Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19689 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-10-31
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Black & White, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, PAL
• Original language: Russian
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 140 minutes

Customer Reviews

A Haunting Russian Interpretation
Detailed and impressive sets in haunting black and white are a feature of both Kozintsev's Shakespeare films. Here, Elsinore is perched sublimely above the ocean's breakers, providing a fiercely naturalistic background to scenes of hypocritical charm and bonhomie involving family and court at the heart of Denmark. Critics have drawn attention to how the director has populated the scenes with lurkers and scribes to represent the feel of a police state.

Bad points? Well, the subtitles are annoying. The English is a translation of Boris Pasternak's period retranslation into Russian of Shakespeare's original words. The result can be farcical in places. Also, the camerawork can be a little unsteady at times.

But don't let these small issues put you off experiencing this haunting Russian interpretation of Hamlet.

Russia and Halmlet
In my opinion the film has not aged well. Looking it up in a reference book before buying it, I was astonished at its rapturous critical reception when it came out. I did see it then, and enjoyed it. Ineveitably much of the text has been jettisoned, and to be honest because of this it is never very clear what the plot or the motivation of the hero is. That said it looks good and the performances are fine. Halmlet however does look too old for the part. He'd have got away with this on the stage, but the screen is not kind to him. Ophelia is glorious.

No politics, only history
This production is an adaptation. The text has been modified. The director is trying all he can to visualize as much of the text as possible. You then have long sections of movement, action, with no speech and all the famous scenes have had their text severely reduced. What's more the film is in Russian with French subtitles. You can imagine the result: the subtitles are too fast and you can't read them, and you approach Shakespeare's text through two levels of translating. Pathetic. But the film has an originality. It is this desire to visualize things and to make us grasp a situation in one glance, at first glance if possible. The director thus privileges action, collective movements and we most of the time have some walking choreography. In other words you find the characteristics of films that were still to come like Star Wars. But I must admit we lose a lot because of the language and the general feeling is that this situational and choreographic directing erases a lot of the deep humane and frantic passion that is Hamlet's both for vengeance, the lower side of the man, and for justice, the shinier side of the man. The film, it is true, shows how the rat nest created by the disturbance brought by the rash assassination of a king by his brother and the re-marriage of the Queen with the assassin leads to the total destruction of all the active elements in this situation and the only possible regeneration coming from outside and re-establishing a new balance of power. We wonder what this film is a metaphor of or a parable for. Is he speaking of the shifting of power from one group to another, from one generation to another? Is he speaking of Stalin or Khrushchev in 1964? Does he have a more general discourse on power and how it floats from one group to the other via assassinations and violence? But then who is he speaking of? Is he speaking of the past or of the present? That's always the problem with Shakespeare because in his days kings and queens were not saints and martyrs. Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I were not exactly paragons of patience and democracy, or even justice. Elizabeth I had one pamphleteer's right hand amputated because he had written a pamphlet she did not like about a prospective wedding of hers with some French nobleman. And in those days amputation was done with a butcher's hatchet and a wooden mallet to bang onto it once it had been placed on the wrist of the person who had to be standing all along. Mr. Stubbs, the right name for the role, the name of this last amputee, even took off his hat with his left hand and shouted "God Save the Queen" before fainting and falling. I have always considered it took some courage for Shakespeare to depict the extreme political and judicial practices of his time when it was not advised to criticize anything at all. And yet that's when the British Parliament managed to become indispensable in providing the ships and the sailors (both from the merchants and their guilds) and the money (from new taxes) necessary to defeat the Invincible Armada sent by Philip II of Spain, the brother in law of Queen Elizabeth I, since he was the husband of Queen Mary I, the elder half sister of Elizabeth I. I just wonder if Kozintsev was not trying to remain far away from direct political questions by being openly historical and locking himself in the past.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, []