Main Cast: Burgess Meredith, Peter Sellars, Molly Ringwald, Jean-Luc Godard, Woody Allen
Release Year: 1987
Country: CH/US/UK/FR
Run Time: 110 minutes
Plot
Two highly talented and innovative directors -- filmdom's Jean-Luc Godard and the theatre world's Peter Sellars -- join forces in this unusual (to say the least) slant on Shakespeare's King Lear. This offbeat adaptation gives the viewer a postmodern taste of Shakespeare through the eyes of a deliberately obscure auteur. The film is set some time after Chernobyl has wiped everything out, and the world is trying to set itself right again. William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth (Peter Sellars) is faced with the task of restoring his famed ancestor's lost works. He visits a resort in Switzerland and becomes fascinated with a visiting gangster, Don Learo (Burgess Meredith) and his lovely daughter, Cordelia (Molly Ringwald), who converse in actual Shakespearean lines. That's as close to the bard as this King Lear gets. It also includes appearances by Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, and director Godard himself as "The Professor," a deranged individual who seems fascinated with Xeroxing his own hand. ~ John Voorhees, All Movie Guide
Review
King Lear, from 1987, marks a shift from the opaqueness of director Jean-Luc Godard's late '70s/early '80s work to his more accessible, yet still dense recent films, which balance the intensely personal with despair over the political. A re-imagining of themes from Shakespeare's play in a "post-Chernobyl" world, the primary thread has William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth (Peter Sellars) trying to recreate his ancestor's plays as a base for a new artistic culture and runs into a modern incarnation of Cordelia (Molly Ringwald) and Lear (Mafia Don Learo played by Burgess Meredith). Godard's use of repeating titles ("no thing" a play on Cordelia's response to her father's queries on her love), the interweaving of Virginia Woolf's The Waves, and candle-lit shots of Renaissance paintings creates a stark portrait of the close of the 20th century. There are large portions that are incomprehensible. It's not clear what the four demons following Shakespeare around symbolize, nor the boy gathering sticks or Woody Allen's appearance as Mr. Alien. Yet the picture ultimately works, which is all that really matters. The disconnect between Learo and Cordelia, the struggle to understand others and the limitations of language, the need to make sense of disasters, to continue to make art and continue in the face of human cruelty, the disconcerting thought that art might not have a place here -- all these ideas are powerfully and clearly conveyed. ~ Michael Buening, All Movie Guide
King Lear is a 1987 filmic adaptation of the Shakespeare play of the same title, directed by Jean-Luc Godard. The script is primarily by Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy. The film's plot, centred around a late descendant of Shakespeare attempting to restore his plays in a world rebuilding itself after the Chernobyl catastrophe obliterates most of human civilisation, is centred around a resort in Nyon, Vaud, Switzerland.
The film also features uncredited cameos by Woody Allen as a film editor named Mr. Alien, Kate and Norman Mailer as themselves, Michèle Pétin and Suzanne Lanza.
Reception
The film has an approval rating of 50% on the ratings aggregator RottenTomatoes.com[1]. All three of the reviews features by the site are negative or mixed, bordering on negative.
The New York Times review by Vincent Canby compares it unfavourably to the rest of Godard's oeuvre as "tired, familiar and out of date", remarking that the few lines of Shakespeare delivered in the play overpower his dialogue, making it "seem much punier than need be". Nonetheless, Canby praises the acting as "remarkably good under terrible circumstances"[2].
Desson Howe of the Washington Post similarly criticises Godard for inappropriately imposing his unique style on Shakespeare's work - "Where the playwright values clarity and poetry, Godard seems to go for obfuscation and banality. Shakespeare aims for universality, while Godard seeks to devalue everything." - whilst reserving praise for the editing and cinematography[3].
Also commenting in The Washington Post, Hal Hinson classifies the film as a "labored, not terribly funny practical joke", "infuriating, baffling, challenging and fascinating" in which Godard "trashes his own talent"[4].
Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, however, called it, "a work of certified genius".
