Love’s Labour’s Lost
2016: Jake O’Hare, Jennifer Sturley

This has never, as far as I can tell, been available on DVD, but it is available through Amazon Prime streaming. It is Love’s Labour’s Lost, broadly considered, rather than a mere adaptation like Ten Things I Hate About You or O, but it is, like those, recast in the context of a modern high school — in this case, an upscale prep-school. How a handful of students could autonomously institute policies that would require the separation of four students from the rest of the school, or proclaim (even in jest) the removal of girls' tongues for coming near the school (when there are already girls in the school), is left as an exercise for the overly fussy, I guess. The language is largely Shakespeare’s, though key terms are permuted to suit the setting (e.g., “kingdom” to “school” etc.), and roles are reassigned accordingly (Jaquenetta, for example, becomes the school nurse, and Don Armado a Spanish teacher as well as a school administrator of uncertain station, but the only one of the lot with an English accent). Like many other versions — even many that are not as wildly adapted — it is deeply cut. The whole runs to only ninety-five minutes. The cutting is reasonably competently done, but one cannot remove that much from any Shakespeare play without encroaching upon the essential.

Technically the film is well and professionally filmed, with decent art direction, and competent acting within the bounds of the vision it’s aiming (though it features no actors of particular name or note). Overall, too, it adhere’s roughly to the shape of the original play, but the apparent focus of the enterprise is on the arch cleverness of the adaptation, rather than the narrative of the play itself. Of the versions I have seen and reviewed so far, it is certainly the least interesting and useful. Not aggressively odious like a few others one might name — just rather tepid and too absorbed in its own cleverness.

All that being said, however, there are some moments that leap out of the movie — particularly at the end, after the cataclysmic change of tone; the montage of scenes after the end of the dialogue is curiously affecting.

Buy or rent the play on Amazon Prime (streaming).