Film Review

As You Like It, Kenneth Branagh's third attempt to capture a Shakespearean comedy on film, tries to find a cinematic middle way between the festive high spirits of his Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and the melancholy strains of Britain on the eve of World War II he explored in his musical version of Love's Labour's Lost (1999). Branagh's As You Like It is his most beautiful film to date, but it is as absorbed by the clash of the brothers (Duke Senior and Duke Frederick and Oliver and Orlando de Boys) as by the romance of the lovers (Rosalind and Orlando; Touchtone and Audrey; Celia and Oliver). Branagh sets his film in late 19^th century Japan, capitalizing on the ways the Meji period opened up the country to foreigners and international commerce. This allows him to expose Shakespeare's play up to some unexpected cross-cultural perspectives (Sumo wrestling and Kabuki dancing as aristocratic entertainments; British imperialism translated into Samurai aggression; and the Forest of Arden reconceived as a Japanese garden).

Unlike the expansive opening of Much Ado About Nothing where the Magnificent Seven come pounding into Tuscany, his As You Like It presents us with Samurai ninjas (a creation of Branagh's often over-heated visual imagination) surfacing from a forest stream and descending from the sky to overwhelm Duke Senior's court watching the civilized pleasures of a Kabuki dancer's performance. Branagh, who has found a way to make military conflict a subtext in all of his Shakespeare films following Henry V, manages to do so again here in As You Like It, where one might least expect it. He wants the liberating expanse of life in Arden exile to exist in stunning contrast with the brutal world of Duke Frederick's court. In fact, it's always night (until the space is reclaimed by Duke Senior [Brian Blessed] and the lovers in the film's final frames) in Branagh's version of the court world. Oliver (Adrian Lester) and Orlando (David Oyelowo) quarrel in the night with a hard rain falling; Oliver torches his barn at night (thinking that it contains his brother); Duke Frederick (also played by Brian Blessed) storms his brother's court and then threatens Oliver at night and subsequently departs for Arden himself under the cover of darkness.

Branagh is so insistent on paying attention to the play's full community of characters that his film is in danger of forgetting that As You Like It belongs to Rosalind—her wit, intelligence, and winning sensibility trumps Frederick's lust for power, Oliver's envy, Orlando's love-sickness, Phoebe's petulance, Touchstone's pragmatism and, most importantly, Jaques's melancholy. The film is an hour old before Branagh finally gets Rosalind (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Orlando together in Arden and they have some trouble wresting its animating spirit away from Kevin Kline's Jaques. Kline gives another masterful Shakespearean performance here. What other contemporary British or American actor has produced a range of performances on film, television, and stage as richly varied as Kline's Hamlet, Bottom, Falstaff, Jaques, and Lear? Kline does wonderful things with his eyes, eyebrows, and the tilt of his head to let us see that his Jaques is less the professional cynic and more the melancholy philosopher genuinely intrigued and puzzled by the variety of human experience that comes tumbling into Arden in search of emotional release and material nurture.

Branagh's Japanese setting allows him to contrast the controlled, tense and claustrophobic interior spaces of the court world defined by silk screens, filtered light, sliding doors, tatami mats, and maiden modesty with the expanse of the forest scenes shot on location at Wakehurst Place in West Sussex. Branagh, and his designer Tim Harvey, dot the landscape with several Japanese touches: a large red Tori through which the exiled party enters and exits Arden; a Buddhist monk who greets the arrivals and becomes the incarnation of Shakespeare's "old religious man"; a raked sand and stone Zen garden where Jaques, seated at its center in the lotus position, announces that he can "suck melancholy...