What with their convoluted plots and complicated verbiage, Shakespeare’s lighter entertainments often sit awkwardly on the screen, requiring magical film-making to convince audiences used to having everything telegraphed in a simpler way.
Kenneth Branagh is definitely not a magical film-maker. He’s much more of an actor’s director who understands the Bard very well but sometimes has difficulty matching the text with imaginative visuals.
To set As You Like It in Japan in the latter part of the 19th century when merchant adventurers, many of them English, set up enclaves around the treaty ports, was a bold move. But then he went and shot it in London, Surrey and West Sussex, adding a few oriental touches, which somewhat undermines the idea of a Japanese Forest of Arden. It’s not an unsuccessful adaptation. But it rarely catches fire as one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays should.
David Oyelowo and Bryce Dallas Howard play Orlando and Rosalind, the two lovers who circle round each other before finally getting together. And though Howard is fresh and sparky, speaking the lines well throughout, Oyelowo can’t really match her. He is better fighting for his inheritance with his brother Oliver (Adrian Lester) who arranges for him to be despatched by the court’s champion sumo wrestler.
That’s a nice touch, and so is the most cinematic sequence right at the beginning, when the Duke and his court watch a kabuki play and his makeshift palace is surrounded by samurai warriors engaged by Frederick, his hostile brother. Both the Duke and Frederick are played by Brian Blessed, an old hand at Shakespeare, someone who knows how to speak the dialogue with a proper panache.
There’s also Richard Briers, another excellent Shakespearean, as Old Adam, Oliver and Orlando’s veteran retainer, Kevin Kline as Jaques, the Duke’s sad philosopher and Alfred Molina as a rather peculiar Touchstone with a fuzzy hair-do. Romola Garai makes an attractive and lively Celia, the Duke’s niece, and Janet McTeer’s blowsy goatherd is a joy.
Branagh’s adaptation emphasises that not only the warring brothers but also the Duke and his brother are mirror images of each other and concentrates on the idea that the bluebell-strewn Forest of Arden is a healing force of nature that eventually takes the sting out of all hostilities. It is a capable, comforting version of a play that can seem much darker than this.
