Nostalgia for Navarre: The Melancholic Metacinema of Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost
2002; Salisbury University; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoWith Love's Lost (2000), narrative image found its animating logic in generic transformation.1 In what was by far the most radical interpretive gesture of his career, Love's Lost was mooted as reinventing of Shakespeare's lesser-known plays as Hollywood musical from the 1930s.2 Pre-release machinery reiterated the singularity of the metamorphosis time and time again, contributing to the forcefully generic coherence of the film's intertextual relay. In the newly diverse context of Shakespearean cinematic appropriation, the potential merging of the drama and musical in of the least known plays appeared viable. When Harvey Weinstein came on board for the American rights, predictions of box-office smashes, Academy Awards, and widespread acclaim ensued. Indeed, such was mogul confidence that Love's Lost was signaled as the first of new Branagh/Shakespeare movie trilogy. On release, however, Love's Lost proved not to be the success that had been predicted. Critical comment was divided between minority that regarded it as curiosity and majority that branded it Branagh's nadir as director (Grant 27), a thing of shreds and patches ... failure (Porter 9). The film, which had cost $8 million, took less than L350,000 in the U.K. and $635,000 in the United States (Dantrey 42), making it, according to the Daily Express reviewer, one of the biggest box office flops of 2000 (Ken's Labour's 39). As result, the futures of both Macbeth and As You Like It, the second and third elements of the trilogy, were placed briefly in doubt. At an early stage in the publicity process, Branagh himself had professed an anxiety about exactly how his generic focus would be received: What we've done with Love's Lost, he stated, might provoke hostile debate (Gristwood 9). Certainly, by any standards. his generic transformation was risky: in the latter half of the twentieth century, commercially successful film musicals have been the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, as many critics have failed properly to appreciate, musical is conscious attempt to re-create particular period in the history of the musical (the 1930s), rather than an endeavor to offer, as in Grease (1978), Dirty Dancing (1987), or, more recently, Moulin Rouge (2001), contemporary reworking or appropriation of the musical form.3 Purposefully sited in reconstruction of past chronology, Love's Lost further dares the box office by consciously invoking vocabularies at some distance from the modern viewer. Conventions of the Hollywood musical are apparent everywhere in Love's Lost.4 Almost three-quarters of the Shakespearean text disappears, ensuring that music registers as the dominant pull on audience attention. As in the traditional musical, the sets are few in number and familiar (library, quadrangle, riverside, and garden). Conventional iconic features include period dress, combination of gaudy and sepia tones, and series of impossibly extravagant physical elevations. Choreography is mainly inspired by Hermes Pan's routines in RKO Astaire-Rogers musicals, and most dance numbers are captured in long takes, with full body shots. At most points, the music functions as it would have done in its earlier Hollywood incarnation: that is, it helps to pinpoint romantic connections (couples are formed through the choreographed visuals of Jerome Kern's I Won't Dance, Don't Ask Me), to interrupt the narrative with vignettes and interludes (such as in the aquatic rendition of Irving Berlin's No Strings [I'm Fancy Free] la Busby Berkeley), and, most importantly, to propel forward the plot. In the main, songs are woven into the film fabric, musical lyrics working as correlative to the play's sixteenth-century rhetorical expression. Thus Berowne's condemnation of academic monasticism is converted into the George Gershwin and Desmond Carter number. …
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