It was Harold Bloom who warned about the risks of judging the characters of Shakespear e. They are much smarter and much more human. Let's put Falstaff, Prince Hal's vitalist friend before becoming Henry V. If he seems cowardly, or boastful, or just a drunk and idiot jester, watch out. Perhaps we are not judging him but describing ourselves with a rare perfection.

The wisdom of the English text consists in that: when trying to judge, we judge ourselves and, consequently, we condemn ourselves. Well, what if what applies to any reader of the Bard serves exactly for director David Michod or, already put, for Netflix himself who pays the party; that is, The King, the movie that was presented yesterday in Venice?

The idea of ​​the film is to adapt William Shakespeare, not another, at the same time and place where Orson Welles made Bells at midnight . It is about reworking much of the arguments of the first and second parts of Henry IV with the necessarily heroic and bloody end of Henry V : " War is his executioner [of God]: war is his punishment : so there are men , who previously broke the King’s justice and are now punished in the King’s war. " And there is Joel Edgerton, also a screenwriter with the director, transformed into what the Harold of the beginning called the fullest representation of human possibility with Hamlet in the play of the playwright of Stratford-upon-Avon: Falstaff.

However, the one who counts is not so much him, but the very nature of the cast. That is, Timothée Chalamet become an omnipresent monarch and not far away, among others, Robert Pattinso n and Lily-Rose Depp . Shakespeare for millennials ? Maybe.

The truth is that the director of Animal Kingdom rather than adapt, simply evil; when he does not subject the works to a boring process of simplification that drowns the text, laminates the plot and leaves all the expressive force in the hands of a casting ( millennial or centennial , what else) the less debatable. Pattinson's intervention with a French accent is quite close to a bad imitation of Monty Python .

What most attracts attention with everything is the absence of point of view. Reading even. The entire film works as a flat episode of Game of Thrones with a more or less appalling ending in which, consciously or unconsciously, the original text is judged and, therefore, condemned. But, be careful, as Bloom would say, that says more (and not very good) about Netflix and Michod than Shakespeare himself.

For some time now, the indefatigable work of production of the chain of marras seems to have fractured into two large groups. On the one hand there would be all those films that go to television for the simple reason that they cannot find a study that finances them. There it would be from Rome , from Alfonso Cuarón , to The Irish , by Martin Scorsese , going through Soderbergh's last work presented on Sunday right here in Venice. And on the other side, there would be that rare collection of bizarre productions as visually appalling as inanes. Does anyone already remember Triple Frontier , JC Chandor, or Velvet Buzzsaw , Dan Gilroy, or Final Ambush , John Lee Hancock? Well, they exist and they do it in the same indefinable place, I fear, that this strange reconstruction of Shakespeare without Shakespeare. And so.

Jack London in Naples

At his side, the official competition had in Martin Eden , by Pietro Marcello, his moment of tormented brightness, opaque glow or, to cite in classic, sound silence. Between the oxymoron and the synesthesia, the adaptation (also this one) of the autobiographical text of Jack London proposed by the Italian director overwhelms . And, at times, it excites .

He does it by his facility to narrate in the past every word of the present; for entering the skin of a foreign character, offering the author himself in sacrifice; for mixing with the threads of the fable the trace of a mysterious documentary image. If it sounds confusing, it's really the echo. Deep.

The strategy is to transform the life of the American author into a personal matter . Very personal. If the novelist narrated his own metamorphosis from the most illiterate poverty to the furiously individual glory of letters and adventure, the film does the same with a character in Naples at the end of the century (19th century). The parallelism is evident because the victim is the same. The suicide of a London declassed with no place among his or any space next to the privileged is the same as that of any artist (including the director himself).

For continuing with Bloom's provocation, this time Marcello's judgment on the character of London, although not Shakespeare, says a lot about the reader. But good.

A rarity to end the day

For the rest, and finally, the official section closed with a rarity that creates hobby. To the amazement. The 'hongkonés' Yonfan presented the animation tape No. 7 Cherry Lane . It is a melodrama read as slowly as precisely . And it is not a metaphor. The film advances without moving from the site, from the naked emotion.

Each plane is lengthened by every detail that informs it until reaching the perfect definition of things such as passion. Or love; that is not changed even by the destiny of a king, who would say, again, Shakespeare.

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