William Shakespeare has left no instruction as to the right way that future playwrights should say “Hamlet”. We only have the text, which reveals new ideas whenever someone new recites it. With the new interpretation of director Aneil Karia, we get the great rice Ahmed in the role, which is enough for the film to exist – but it is perhaps the only one in a remake that could have chosen not to be. (Ahmed previously played in the short film Oscar de Karia, “The Long Goodbye”, which suggested a real promise for future collaborations.)
Transpose to Modern London, where Hamlet belongs to a rich family of Indian heritage, the version of Karia keeps the original text, although abused, reorganized and sometimes spoken by different characters. The scriptwriter Michael Lesslie supervised this adaptation, which leads to unhappy relics from an earlier era – not the iambic pentameur, which is sacred, but refers to kings and lords and a royal society which does not translate a little to the world of modern enterprise.
Here, Elsinore is a society and the murder of Hamlet’s father by his uncle Claudius (art Malik) and the early marriage with his mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha) is part of a hostile takeover which does not feel despicable enough to justify the tragic blood bath. Shot on a seriously lit digital video – which smooths the faces and distorts the landscapes – the portable look of the film recalls the relatively elegant Y2K version of Michael Almereyda, but also poorly designed, with Ethan Hawke. Ahmed’s hamlet is also Mopy and dissatisfied, apparently dealing with mental health problems in addition to those of family betrayal.
The lateral characters, like Ophelia by Morfydd Clark and his brother Laertes (Joe Alwyn), are so barely drawn, this requires a pre -existing familiarity with the game for their relationships to be clear. Ophelia is a longtime friend of Hamlet, but her tragic fate does not make sense in this story, any more than the bloody treatment of Hamlet by his father Polonius (Timothy Spall, who obtains the scene of the most disturbing death of the film, but nothing else to do).
All the good lines go to Hamlet, which Hmed embodies as a deeply agitated young man. When Claudius sends him away (to Dehli, in a rare dialogue adjustment), Hamlet is led to a construction site late at night – signs that say “Elsenore” and graffiti that reads “rotten” – where he is beaten by his uncle’s thugs. This unexpected action scene brings a welcome dose of excitement. For a while, it seems that we can face an organized family of crimes, which would actually be a fairly original way to reinvent the room.
Karia finds a unique way of presenting Hamlet’s suicidal soliloquy: behind the steering wheel of a fantasy BMW, rushing the London streets to the rain like a Danish prince with a death wish. A large part of his world feels without soul, because Hamlet and Ophelia are surrounded by rich comrades, tempted by cocaine and caviar, without any sense of the way the life could have been better when Hamlet’s father was alive. The scenes with the ghost (Avijit Dutt, lying dead at first, then saw distance) do not do much to dispel the idea that Hamlet loses his head, although his “madness” presents himself a 21st century empathy for mental health.
All of this is built in a spectacular Indian style dance number at Gertrude’s wedding banquet, where the “Prince” Couvant asks the artists to recreate the crime in order to assess the reaction of his uncle. The film culminates early with this dynamic scene, which is much more effective than the culminating duel, although the reaction of Claudius is not clear. As a pantomime of the dancers murder, channeling the blood red poison in the sleeping king’s ear, it is not clear if this is supposed to be the way Claudius killed his brother or the interpretative dance of Hamlet on the famous play for which he named. It’s a bit like watching a zombie movie where you can’t help but ask yourself if the characters have already seen a zombie film before, or if they live in a world where it is a whole new concept.
Do these tragic fools exist in a world without Shakespeare, or are they simply condemned to repeat it?
