“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,” goes a famous gloss on Shakespeare’s play from TS Eliot, in his modernist poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Rather than the umpteenth re-staging of Hamlet, one of world literature’s most famous texts, Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao also dodges familiarity by setting her new film Hamnet [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s popular novel, against the backdrop of the “revenge tragedy’s” composition, revealing a lesser-known personal inspiration for its writing. Far more rewarding for privileging the Bard’s wife Agnes (played by Jessie Buckley) as an equal than for its manipulative emotional tenor, the film has garnered great critical and audience reactions since its Telluride Film Festival premiere and its screening at Toronto. It now shows as the Mayor of London’s Gala at BFI London.

Following her difficult experience making the Marvel superhero film The Eternals, Zhao returns to a more comfortable dramatic register, bringing to bear her strong influence from Terrence Malick by imagining Shakespeare’s famous birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon as an uncorrupted Eden, rife with inviting forest greenery and avian life, and shielded from Jacobean England’s social upheaval. But Agnes and Will (as he’s known for the film’s majority, commandingly brought to life by Paul Mescal) are still non-conformist presences in these environs, with the former whispered to be a descendent of pagan “forest witches” and the latter bridling at his job as his village’s Latin tutor, when he really dreams of London’s stages. Zhao and O’Farrell’s script is at its best when allowing Shakespeare’s future reputation to hover gently in our minds over these modest events, whilst we see him in thrall to a domestic partnership that still shows the limitation of possibilities for women in this time period. 

Agnes eventually bears three children: a daughter, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and twins Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes). It being an era where reaching adolescence is its own achievement, Hamnet eventually perishes from one of the successive “plagues”, heaping grief upon Agnes and a sense of guilt on Will, who, now successfully established as a playwright in London, has left the burden of total domestic labour on his wife. Zhao then beckons us to see the writing of Hamlet as a direct response to this grief and mourning process, beginning with the similarity in name, and tying the play’s depictions of trauma and inaction to the psyche-swallowing intensity of losing a family member.

The eventual staging of Hamlet at the famous Globe theatre cannily imagines the play taking place in a kind of afterlife, with the Danish prince yearning for a father lost to the “other side”, which is, actually, the “real” world where his father tirelessly works – a very Malickian idea. Hamlet or Hamnet lives now in the stage-play world, able to be reborn ceaselessly, as the text is staged again and again into the present day and future – he’s someone veritably immortal, when his parents must eventually die themselves. Yet the main limitation is Zhao staging this suggestive idea with a cynically coercive emotional force, attempting to stir catharsis by teasing out our tears. Deploying a new arrangement of Max Richter’s perennially used “On the Nature of Daylight” in its closing moments, the film ultimately goes against Shakespeare’s spirit by using his dramaturgy only for therapeutic sentiment. The rest is not silence, but a rainfall of tears.

Hamnet is a production by the UK and USA, staged by Hera Pictures, Neal Street Productions, Amblin Entertainment and Book of Shadows. Universal Pictures holds the worldwide rights.