You thought you were free of TIFF coverage? Well, think again, because there are still a lot of movies to discuss, even if already intertwined with NYFF reviews. In any case, let's consider Shakespeate and a certain prince of Denmark.
There lived and died a Hamnet before Hamlet came to be on the page, on the stage, and in the imagination of countless folks stretching from the Elizabethan age into eternity. At TIFF 50, however, Aneil Karia's Hamlet screened before Zhao's Hamnet, a bit overshadowed by the film that had already rocked Telluride by that point and still promises to be a talking point for months to come. The same could be said for Scarlet, Mamoru Hosoda's latest animated fantasy, which takes its cues from the Bard's tragedy for one wild ride into purgatory and beyond…
HAMLET, Aneil Karia
It's a credit to Shakespeare's mastery just how flexible his works are, surviving, thriving, and sometimes even inviting reinterpretation. In Aneil Karia's Hamlet, the action is transposed from a vaguely historical, probably 16th-century Denmark to modern-day London, where a wealthy Indian family mourns its patriarch's death. The film begins in the middle of funeral rites, as the prodigal son helps prepare his father's body for burial. Serene and pondered, every gesture speaks of filial duty, devotion that's altogether at odds with the rest of the clan's behavior. Still that night, a betrothal is announced between the widow, Gertrude, and her brother-in-law, Claudius, angering the heir who can't believe such hasty nuptials when the dead man's bed still lies unmade upstairs.
Some reactionaries may ding this Hamlet for its modernization and new cultural context, but those are not the adaptation choices one should be worried about. Shakespeare's texts have been reinvented countless times before, and this is hardly the first such spin on the material, recalling the playwright's popularity in Britain's former colonies and the Bollywood adaptations that came into being during the 90s and 2000s - Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider, for example. What rankles is the extent of abridgment, cutting down a titanic piece of drama to fit into 114 rushing minutes where the basic action is condensed into what feels like a couple of crazy days in the characters' lives. If you were curious about seeing Riz Ahmed play the "poor Yorick" spiel or Morfydd Clark as Ophelia raving mad about flowers, I'm sorry to say those passages have been excised.
The text's simplification goes hand in hand with formal strategies that strive to communicate realism with all the clichés that implies. Neither Karia nor DP Stuart Bentley seems familiar with the concept of a tripod, preferring to adopt a tremulous camerawork that's fixated on the actors' faces to the detriment of nearly everything else. Manda James and Mikkel E.G. Nielsen's editing is another frantic signaling at the narrative's urgency and the exercise's intended grit. Overall, these stylings can't help but bristle against the Shakespearean verse, pulling for a mimetic idea of authenticity in aesthetics while words reach for the stars. Moments like the ghost's apparition tend to stand out precisely because Karia is forced to vary his realist idioms and, for once, find temporary harmony between the many elements at play.
That's not to say there's no value in dissonance. Some of Hamlet's best performances embrace it to produce volatile characterizations that often feel unstable, on the verge of fragmentation. Only Timothy Spall's Polonius and Sheeba Chaddha's Gertrude seem to live and breathe the language, while everyone else strains somewhat, though not necessarily to the film's detriment. Riz Ahmed is rather electric as Hamlet, rethinking the play's existential inquiries and fatalistic mindset to be a blast of vengeful rage. Driving like a madman while screaming the soliloquy, Ahmed draws "to be or not to be" away from most accepted academic readings, going for a call to action rather than suicidal contemplation. Discussions of this being the right or wrong way to read Hamlet seem beside the point when so much of the project is about reinvention.
Problems arise when fiery performances can't compensate for uninspired filmmaking or when disastrous cuts compress the tragedy out of shape, meaning, and often purpose. Even some inventions struggle to justify themselves, such as the transformation of Fortinbras' forces into a crowd of unhoused peoples taking up arms against the Elsinore corporation, leaving the updated Hamlet at a crossroads where every path leads to political pitfalls and incoherence. The motivations behind much of the violence are also hard to defend in their transfiguration from stage to screen, with the eleventh-hour deaths being especially altered. Thank heavens for Ahmed's commitment and Chaddha's best-in-show prowess because I'm not sure either Michael Lesslie's screenplay or Karia's direction would've stood a fighting chance without them.
SCARLET, Mamoru Hosoda
While Elisa wasn't a fan of Mamoru Hosoda's latest back at Venice, I confess myself charmed. As ever, the director best known for titles like Mirai and Belle is keen on overcomplicating sentimental premises, playing with the porous barriers between realities, past, present, life and death. Indeed, while Scarlet starts at the actual castle that inspired the Bard in his descriptions of Elsinor, most of its narrative unfurls in a liminal non-space that's a bit like the Christian purgatory but also not. However, before plunging into the metaphysical storytelling, this anime master is keen on impressing upon the audience the scale of an old-school epic, while also indulging in lyrical rhythms, operatic grandeur that makes something like the king's death into a song of silences, screaming blades, a daughter's wail.
Ah, yes, because this gender-bent Hamlet, now called Scarlet, isn't away when her father perishes nor does he die in relative peace. Instead, Gertrude and Claudius are made more active and openly perfidious, conspiring for a public execution. In other passages, the prince-turned-princess' fate echoes those of the queen and Ophelia on stage. She dies poisoned by Gertrude's goblet, falling into a pool of flowers like the latter lady's watery grave. Only, this adventure doesn't end in death. Rather, it starts, for Scarlet is a post-mortem Hamlet in a wasteland that captures some of the ineffable terror of nightmares, something beyond logic and far away from reason. Death is the great equalizer, so time makes no sense here, and all the dead of all times commune.
Thus, the narrative restarts and reframes as the negotiation of choosing life or death, with forgiveness taking the place of life in this lifeless existence, while revenge brings forth total annihilation. Just as one can define Karia's Hamlet by how the director approaches the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, the same can be done for Scarlet. Because Hosoda's creation often feels like an expansion of that passage to feature-length, emphasizing the existential peril and the cost of one's soul when given to hatred. If Karia saw fighting as the way of life, the Japanese filmmaker takes the direct opposite approach, almost equating Scarlet's need for punitive justice to Hamlet's succumbing to death's sweet call. Again, neither approach is right or wrong, but instead demonstrates the text's flexibility.
Moreover, Scarlet is full of indelible images and strange animation quirks that start right at the characters' rough delineations in conjunction with digital swaths of color that beckon the impression of pencil drawings over watercolors. In the otherworld, where swords' hilts define a makeshift graveyard and Dragon ex Machina is a viable dramatic solution, the aesthetic tensions are even more acute. Because Hosoda often leans on the unreality of his figures while juxtaposing them on backgrounds that are both minimalist in design and realist in execution. Various times, Scarlet, her comrades and enemies, seem to float above this non-existence, while their gestures and lines speak of truths too painful to consider. Consider the sight of a child among these material spirits, something that shakes the princess and her film to their core, forcing further reflection.
After that little girl appears, Hosoda's thesis seems to reshape itself again, this time around an anti-war message, putting Scarlet forward as the rare anti-war film that refuses to take the shape of a war movie. Suddenly, the princess' crisis isn't a solipsistic one, but the question of the human condition given space to expand into a lyrical animated epic. Sure, it's a bit too ambitious for its own good, yet I always think it's better to have ambition and fail than settle for mediocrity. And, whatever one might say, Scarlet is as far from boring mediocrity as one can get. It's also an emotional gut punch like all other Hosoda joints, confronting the audience with utter sincerity and asking them to surrender their shields of irony, accepting the emotions blossoming on screen. Are you ready to surrender?
Hamlet played as part of TIFF 50's Centrepiece section, while Scarlet was a Special Presentation. The anime, which is also playing in NYFF 63, will have its theatrical release on December 12, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.