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VENICE 2010 STORMY WEATHER by Harlan Kennedy It’s the getaway tale that got away. So easy to love. Yet so hard to ‘do’ definitively. Even to do deftly and imaginatively enough to bring justice to its mixed and many elements. THE TEMPEST, a play set on a magical island, is the closest Shakespeare ever came to a vacation brochure on stage. “Come to Prospero Island.” Inhale its balmy breezes! Wonder at its scenic beauty! Meet its resident sprite Ariel! Marvel at its monster Caliban, part man, part fish! In the evening have dinner (prices included) with ruler Prospero and his lovely daughter Miranda. Prospero might perform some magic tricks for you. He can do quite a lot with that staff, and with his books, never mind with his lightfooted assistant Ariel. The only catch for vacationers? You must be shipwrecked first. The mother of tempests will be thrown in at the start of your visit. It will spew you forth on a rocky atoll, inspired for Shakespeare, goes the history, by a true tale of wreck and disaster in the 16^th century mid-Atlantic. The “vexed Bermoothes”, so named then, are a long way from the Venice lagoon. But our festival island, the Lido, has some little kinship with Shakespeare’s. We come; we see (movies); we are conquered by enchantment. So Julie Taymor’s screen version of THE TEMPEST seemed apt for a closing flick at the 67^th Venice Film Festival. It’s the latest addition to a long line of pictures inspired by the play. From FORBIDDEN PLANET (Robbie the Robot as Caliban) to Peter Greenaway’s PROSPERO’S BOOKS, from the western YELLOW SKY (Greg Peck and Dick Widmark moving in on Walter Huston’s desert Prospero) to Derek Jarman’s THE TEMPEST. And we mustn’t forget remoter relatives – stories of challenge, awakening and catharsis on a distant shore – like Nicolas Roeg’s CASTAWAY or Michael Powell’s AGE OF CONSENT. The latter starred Helen Mirren opposite a Prospero-ish James Mason in a sea-lapped Antipodean paradise. Now Miss Mirren – excuse me, ‘Dame Helen’ – plays the protagonist herself, sea-changed/sex-changed into Prospera, ruler of a chunk of rock in the middle of an ocean. Its lava floors, crisp grey sands and variegated flora were shot in Hawaii. For another production novelty, the controversial contempo British comic Russell Brand plays the main clown, Trinculo. For another still, Ariel and Caliban are played respectively by the white Ben Whishaw and the black Djimon Hounsou. An African, cast as the man-monster? Protest alert!! That’ll get the political correctness crowd raging or foaming. Shakespeare, you are putting up with many liberties. Yet oddly, Taymor’s TEMPEST sometimes feels well-behaved, even a bit tame, as if the liberties are in the details while the larger vision remains passive, respectful, traditional. The verse is finely spoken, especially by Dame H, who looks terrific in her primitive glad-rags and spiky bleach-blonde hair. (Either the crudest elements or the finest coiffeurs are responsible for that). Mirren explains by her acting why THE TEMPEST is important. It’s about a human playing God in a godless world-away-from-the-world. This dispensing of justice and sovereignty is a tricky, volatile, anguished business – yet it is better (Shakespeare implies) that a man or woman does it than some confabulated Being in the skies. Malice and mirth (the conspiring aristos and drunken clown-proles), a monster (Caliban) and a spritely muse (Ariel), move around the island. They seem to describe concentric circles as they converge, fast or slow (depending on the production), on Prospero, their target or magnet. And there is the ambiguity. Is Prospero the story’s endangered quarry or its luring mastermind? A production should resolve this and I am not sure Taymor’s does. Mirren’s gender novelty, surprisingly, makes no difference. Surely the transexualising of Prospero should have radiated out – or Taymor should have ensured that it did – to affect or re-shape other parts of the drama? No, the ambivalence remains. So does the sense that this film is a mosaic, a broken pattern of beautiful parts, as disconnected as the disparate Hawaiian locales. Here a rocky beach, there a mangrove swamp, here a volcanic crag, there a tall forest. Only in Ariel’s manifestations and metamorphosings do the molten possibilities of cinema – the whirring and stirring of make-believe into something motile yet moulded – create a world where differences come together and sense is made of visual diversity. If the film’s unevenness is bad news for Taymor fans, it’s good news for TEMPEST fans. Ooh goody, we say, the play is still unconquered! There will be more versions. It really is as rich and complex as we thought. Taymor joins a long line of stage and screen directors who haven’t got it quite right. Greenaway’s PROSPERO’S BOOKS, the best attempt so far, was a little too bookish. Jarman’s THE TEMPEST was too campy, though who could not love blues singer Elizabeth Welch closing the movie with “Stormy Weather.” On stage Peter Hall and Peter Brook (“ye elves of halls, brooks….”) had a few goes each and didn’t make it. Like the weather itself THE TEMPEST rolls on, ever changing, ever defying human coercion or control, ever moody and magnificent. The play really does answer to the old Hollywood catchline: “All human life is here.” Only not just human. It’s about gods and monsters, angels and devils, men and magicians. Only the brave attempt to catch its multitudinousness on screen, let alone on stage. Bring on the next challenger. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved