Bill (Shakespeare's) Haider
Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider, set in 1995 Kashmir, is not the best Hamlet film I've seen, but it's top five, easy. Maybe top three. It takes the seemingly radical but brilliant step of spending almost the entire first half of the film establishing the situation -- Haider's father, a doctor, is fingered by an unknown informant for sheltering a militant leader and subsequently "disappeared" by the Indian Army. Haider (a wisely toned-down Shahid Kapoor -- even during the mad scenes) spends the first half of the film not knowing if his father is dead or alive, and wondering if his mother (played by the still-gorgeous and always terrific Tabu) is canoodling with his uncle. The Ghost (Irfan Khan in a scene-stealing role -- but playing a fellow political prisoner, not Haider's father) shows up right before the intermission to say Guess What. (Rhymes with "prevenge me.")
And then we're off on Hamlet. A Hamlet in which you believe intensely in the setting, the family structure, and the fact that these people will yes indeed kill each other a lot in very real non-stage-fighty ways. (And in which Haider not killing his uncle at prayer works considerably better than in most secular versions, of course.) There's a very nice, very subtle use of Pakistan as a stand-in for the "undiscovered country" of death -- the Ghost is from Pakistan, and Haider threatens to "go across the border" more than once, to which his mother replies "you cannot return from there." And so forth. Even the Kashmir-for-medieval-Denmark works as geographical parallel (snow, northernness, violence, etc) and the reference to Alexander in the (also well handled) grave-digger scene makes more sense in a country where he actually walked than it does in Denmark. The play-within-a-play is a combination traditional Kashmiri puppet show and Bollywood dance number, and (of course) is brilliant. The death of "Salman and Salman" (the movie's R&G) was terrifying, and Ophelia's madness and suicide actually works which it usually doesn't.
Haider doesn't hit all of the play's beats, but it's one of the rare adaptations where the deletions and compressions actually make narrative sense (or show a wise knowledge about what Bhardwaj thought he could make work on film). It still doesn't nail it quite as well as Bhardwaj's Omkara did Othello (which is to say "better than any other version"), but it's probably a better movie -- better and more richly filmed, certainly.
cassielsander should really see this while it's still at the River East. As should you all, but he especially should.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xakmvJ0WPa4
And then we're off on Hamlet. A Hamlet in which you believe intensely in the setting, the family structure, and the fact that these people will yes indeed kill each other a lot in very real non-stage-fighty ways. (And in which Haider not killing his uncle at prayer works considerably better than in most secular versions, of course.) There's a very nice, very subtle use of Pakistan as a stand-in for the "undiscovered country" of death -- the Ghost is from Pakistan, and Haider threatens to "go across the border" more than once, to which his mother replies "you cannot return from there." And so forth. Even the Kashmir-for-medieval-Denmark works as geographical parallel (snow, northernness, violence, etc) and the reference to Alexander in the (also well handled) grave-digger scene makes more sense in a country where he actually walked than it does in Denmark. The play-within-a-play is a combination traditional Kashmiri puppet show and Bollywood dance number, and (of course) is brilliant. The death of "Salman and Salman" (the movie's R&G) was terrifying, and Ophelia's madness and suicide actually works which it usually doesn't.
Haider doesn't hit all of the play's beats, but it's one of the rare adaptations where the deletions and compressions actually make narrative sense (or show a wise knowledge about what Bhardwaj thought he could make work on film). It still doesn't nail it quite as well as Bhardwaj's Omkara did Othello (which is to say "better than any other version"), but it's probably a better movie -- better and more richly filmed, certainly.
cassielsander should really see this while it's still at the River East. As should you all, but he especially should.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xakmvJ0WPa4