Sogno di una notte di mezza estate

I admit, that I have not read the play, so probably all of the credit for the idea goes to Shakespeare himself. But I was also caught by the magic of the pictures. The actors and actresses were so pretty, the story so nicely recited, and the atmosphere somehow magically ravishing. I got a lot of positive feelings out of this movie, and when I walk through the forest now, I am reminded of them. Well, this film did leave a wonderful trace in my mind. Hopefully, it lasts for a couple of days. I give it an 8/10.

This is a wonderful film and an excellent version of the classic that was done so very, very well in 1935 and 1968. No, this is not the Royal Shakespeare Company, it's Hollywood but damn good Hollywood. Why? How can canned commercial movie-making compete with the Bard's best? Why does this version make that of the RSC three years before PALE? Well, there's the cast, for one. Stanley Tucci is delightful as a drole erring Puck carrying out the directives of Rupert Everett's pompous Oberon. The delightful Cast of Players, including Rockwell, Irwin, Rees, Wright and (tah-DAH!) Kevin Klein as Bottom. The scenes with the lovelier than lovely Michelle Pfeiffer's Titania are wonderful and poignant. It is delightful to see that gentle erotica can be suggested without nudity or slathering tongues, sucking lips as well as the usual grunts-pants-moans, etc. The lovers are likewise delightful with great, fun-packed performances by Christian Bale's Demetrius and Dominic West's Lysander in complete tune with Anna Fiel's Hermia and Calista Flockhart's Helena. Even David Strathairn's Theseus and Sophie Marceau's Hippolyta are wonderful. The story is moved from Athens Greece to Athens, Italy, at the turn of the 19th century with the lovers escaping on bicycles. Stanley Tucci's confrontation with the bike is a delight. This is a wonderful film with some new twists that depart from but do not detract from the Bard. The bit with Kevin Kline's wife, hard-looking but attractive Heather Parisi, works well with the setting of this fun-filled, joyful presentation.

A tale of gods and mortals and that most confusing of subjects – love. With relationships confused on earth, things become very simple when Puck is given reign to cast love spells on several people to create a complex tangle of love that shows that love never runs straight or true.

I'm that I will be seen as some sort of idiot for not liking this film but, in some vague sort of defence, I'd like to point out that I have seen and enjoyed many other Shakespeare adaptations on the screen and enjoyed many of them. The problem I had with this film was that more time had been spent on the visual presentation rather than the presentation of the story. For this reason I though the film looked really nice and had real imagination and flair behind it – but the plot was not given as much work.

I like to think that I am not stupid, but, were it not for the fact that I had a rough knowledge of the story prior to watching this version, I would have really struggled to get a hold of what was going on, as it was I still found it difficult to keep up with. I would have appreciated it more had the film been a little kinder in helping me understand the characters and the plot without relying on me to catch and understand every word (which I couldn't).

I can read Shakespeare and understand the dialogue fine, however when it is coming at me at machine gun pace, I'll struggle and need the visual aspect of the story to help me out a little bit by making the film free to clutter and easy to understand. I'm afraid much of it was lost on me as I struggled to keep up, and the film suffered as a result. Visually of course, it is great and it has it's witty moments but it didn't really do it for me.

Which, considering the great cast, was a shame. Kline stole most of the scenes he was in and was the best part of the film for me, Tucci was an enjoyable Puck, but with many others I found it difficult to find the characters behind the famous faces. Pfeiffer and Everett were both good but I didn't get much from Flockhart, Friel, Bale or West. The cast is deep in faces but this distracted me even more and served to remind me of how much window dressing this film seemed to have when all I really wanted was good story telling.

Overall I didn't enjoy this film simply because I found it hard to get into. I fully intend to watch it again in the future as I feel it may have been partially my fault, but I must say that I did expect a little help from the film. If you look at some recent adaptations of Shakespeare for the cinema you'll see that many have their own touches (visual, not dialogue) and that many of these help to deepen the characters and add understanding for the audience. This film had none of that – the fact that it was a film was used to make it look good and bring in a strong famous cast, it should have used the media to also make the story more accessible and fun to watch.

I'm a professional live theatre stagehand. People who are too centered on movies will have a hard time with this picture. If you could see the original first run performance of this play in Elizabethan England you would think you had stumbled into an over-costumed poetry reading. If the movie is hard to follow try & imagine what viewing that play would be like. It is the measure of Shakespeare's greatness that now 400 years later & in a medium born of photography that this greatest of fantasies still rings true. Try to show some respect; Shakespeare defined modern English. In comparing the lines to the original I thought that the adaptation was sensitive & well thought out. Simplified to fit the film medium but not sacrificing any of the truly great lines that actors drool over. The fairy world sets seemed cramped to me & reminded me of Cocteau's Beauty & the Beast. I personally found the setting of the movie in turn of century Italy kind of fun. Resetting Shakespeare in times & places other than he wrote is pretty much standard practice. The bicycles & the phonographs were amusing to me & generated some fun business for the actors. Kevin Kline was excellent as the ass. He got you to sympathize not pity or deride. In fact the whole amateur troop was memorable. Stanley Tucci was the quintessential Puck. Calista Flockhart threw everything including the kitchen sink into her part. Don't accuse her of overacting though; you'll only give away that you have never been deeply in love. Michelle Pfeiffer was radioactive beautiful, probably fatal closer than ten feet. Rupert Everett maintained perfect believability in a difficult part which is essentially support for Puck. As an answer to anyone who thought that things were a bit oversexed. The Renaissance was all about the rediscovery of the fact that people are noble & beautiful, not sinful & ugly. Shakespeare was one of the greatest products of the Renaissance. The movie is true to those Renaissance ideals. To sum up; a class act & class acts are not for everybody.

There have been many adaptations of Shakespeare plays over the last decade or so, most of them aimed squarely at younger viewers. You know the drill: The director picks out rocking, hip tunes to spice up the soundtrack and some hot, young stars to broadly interpret the Bard's work.

That's not the case here. Kevin Kline gets to ham it up as Nick Bottom, the base mechanical with delusions of thespian grandeur, and Michelle Pfeiffer gets to show off her own acting chops as Titania, the Queen of the fairies. Okay, so maybe a little knowledge of the play itself would help the average viewer, but if you're not a fan of the play, you can still witness some absolutely sumptuous camerawork and some funny, funny scenes - many of them dealing with the spellbound Bottom, who's been turned into a jackass. Stanley Tucci underplays (somewhat surprisingly) his role as the mischievous Puck, and even Callista Flockhart turns in a solid performance as one of four human (non-fairy) lovers.