Pericles
2016: Roberto Quagliano

Billed as “a stunning post-modern interpretation”, this is a high-concept rendition of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, after a fashion, but it is less an interpretation of the play than a reinvention or redeployment of it for other purposes. Whether it is post-modern or not depends, I suppose, on what the term is supposed to mean at the moment. The language (most of it, anyway) is in fact Shakespeare’s; but there is a modern frame story wrapped around Shakespeare’s already overly-complicated play. Both parts — the inner and the outer — are filmed in an undifferentiated modern setting, with modern costumes, and with its characters wandering aimlessly from one place to another, without any geography really to distinguish them: mostly they amble or limp among green areas between freeways and other highways. There are frequent fly-overs of military helicopters with menacing views of their guns, and intermediate enjoinders that we (or the characters) are in a forbidden area; Gower is a bum who wakes with a half-empty wine bottle in the grass; Thaisa manages to be committed to burial at sea where there is no water in sight. Cars, trucks, and trains are constantly passing by, apparently for the sole purpose of obscuring the spoken dialogue, and were their passage excised from the performance, it would reduce it (profitably) by at least ten minutes.

When the whole enterprise is finished, it is all written off as “just a dream” — one of the sorriest story-destroying dodges ever contrived — in an apparently post-nuclear world (though that’s never made absolutely clear) where two focal characters (a father and a daughter) are apparently dying of radiation poisoning. The connection of this to the story overall is not particularly clear, nor is there any apparent purpose to it all.

The parts are passably well cast, but the context provides no hooks or frames of reference from which to speak the lines, and accordingly — not really to the discredit of the players — the acting is by turns passionate, intense, casual, or just arbitrary. It is indeed to their credit that they manage to make as much of their parts as they do. They are clearly trying to make them work in the local context, and if you know the play already, you can see them and assimilate them piecemeal as pieces of a larger whole that you supply for yourself. On that scale, some parts that are genuine, even affecting, and worth noting. If you do not already know the play, they are given only the slenderest support on which to make the narrative cohere. It’s a pity, really — there seems to be a fair amount of genuine talent here, mostly going to waste. The musical score toys with classical fragments, Indian music, and edgy modern computer sounds; other arbitrary insertions, like the helicopters, seem relevant to nothing in particular. A black Diana moves through the play, reciting Diana’s lines at some points, and at others some random bits implying a slave’s role from Gone with the Wind.

Experimental film is what it is. Occasionally it turns up something clever or brilliant; most often it produces a mess like this. It is a chaotic rendition of a difficult play, with nevertheless some sporadic flickers of insight. It’s worth seeing if one is a completist, but certainly don’t start here. Nobody is going to get from it any real impression of the play or its meaning.