A Tempestade

The Tempest has been interpreted in many different ways ranging from more or less traditional views as dealing with Art to more post-modern approaches that like to dissect the play along post-colonial, feminist, gender or deconstructionist lines. The reason why Jarman's version left me fairly cold is that I didn't have a clue what he was on about. What is the underlying vision/idea/concept behind this rendering of Shakespeare? The previous reviewers do not get much further than revenge tragedy, punk show, but surely there is more to it, isn't there? This is not to say that there is no vision here, just that I was hard put to discover it. Be that as it may, there are still things to enjoy. The punk flavour is refreshing and funny. Toyah Wilcox as Miranda and Jack Birkett as Caliban are wonderful. I did not much care about Williams as Prospero ... not enough magic I suppose. The switches between the old monastery/castle and the (very English) world outside can be a little unsettling at times, but I guess that is intentional. All in all, interesting but not quite the success I had hoped it might be (particularly after seeing Jarman's Caravaggio).

Derek Jarman has shown us time and time again that dialog is not his strong suit. He is a painter, and paint he does. His films are almost always visually splendid, but about as exciting to watch as paint that is already dry. Watch his movies in fast forward, the really fast setting that you can only get on DVD. In The Tempest, Jarman does very little with the script or the characters, using them as simply a lattice to hang a very long and well-constructed cinematographic frame. He even goes so far as to contradict Shakespeare's original script to achieve these excrucriatingly slow and lifeless scenes. There is none of the romance, magic, trickery, or urgency the script calls for, little spontaneity, and the character of Caliban in particular is reduced to a quivering and insane idiot of sorts, similar to Gaveston in Jarman's Edward II. It is too bad that this is just about the only film version of The Tempest available.

"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines."

Those are the directions that Hamlet gives the players on how to perform the Mousetrap. While the rhythms of Elizabethan English are difficult for Americans, they seems to come naturally for British actors, and those here perform it well enough.

The problems with this production arise, as they often do for THE TEMPEST, from the director's efforts to make it visually striking. Because of the magic that lies at the heart of Shakespeare's autumnal work, its gorgeous language has fallen prey to people who think the best way to stage it is to think what Quentin Crisp would sneer at as too camp and turn it up a couple of notches. One Shakespeare in the Park staging required a dozen people to play Ariel, including a Sumo wrestler; and Peter Greenaway's gloss on the play, PROSPERO'S BOOK, is so bad that when I saw it with some friends, I disrupted the occasion by guffawing at the over-the-top images. They show up here, too.

What all these geniuses fail to realize is that the play is a boy-meets-girl story, something Shakespeare wrote several dozen times. At its core is a coming-of-age story for Miranda, an adolescent girl who is old enough to leave her father. She is confronted by various male archetypes before settling on the only boy her own age. The Bard of Avon's message is so normal, that like should marry like, that youth calls to youth and that Show Business is the process of taking these ordinary and important stories and making us pay for them by wrapping them in mystery ... well, so normal that people miss the point.

The play's real magic is the story of Rapunzel and Snow White and all the other fairy tales which Bruno Bettelheim has shredded to show their symbolic content. That and the language. These should be enough for anyone like me, who cares for these things. It's too bad that the people who produced this version either don't care about Shakespeare or think that no normal person will.

The stuff dreams are made of. A complete retelling of the play as a dream of vengeance: will baffle purists, but will delight the open-minded. A superb effort: great cinematography, acting, and script. 11-stars...***********

I'm amazed that of all the reviews I've looked at nobody seems to have noticed one of the main points of this film, or at least how I saw it. It seems like one big homosexual fantasy, camp clothing, a glorified nude Ferdinand, a definite sexual tension between Ariel and Prospero, and as a final climax, a group of men in tight sailor suits dancing the hornpipe. This whole approach, once you get used to it, provides you with all sorts of fantastic scenes and images. The sight of an innocent Ariel being pulled towards a disgusting nude Sycorax in order to perform "her earthy and abhorr'd commands", is one of the darkest I've ever scene in a Shakespeare film. However by the end of the film I'd grown tired of the style and the final hornpipe dance was just too much to take. Still overall its an interesting interpretation of the play.