The Talkies: Ken and Kolya
Bowman, James
by James Bowman Ken and Kolya Branagh's histrionics lack Jan Sverak's velvet touch. N ow we know who put the "Ham" in Hamlet. Who else but Kenneth Branagh? His new, four-hour movie of the play is...
...At least for a moment we believe it, and that is the most that the theater—or the movies—can ever do for us...
...In heartrending terms that are a tribute to the best acting from a six-year-old that I have ever seen, he tells her how unhappy he is and how much he misses her...
...I find such stuff indescribably vulgar—like that other bad habit he has of making the schmaltzy soundtrack swell up to drown out the subtler music of Shakespeare's verse...
...The American Spectator • March 1 9 9 7 67...
...Having mused in Hamlet's typically feckless but self-aware way on the irony of his own position vis a vis that of the coarse and brutal Fortinbras (Rufus Sewell), Branagh gives an enormous and unexpected significance to the lines: ...Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honor's at the stake...
...But liberation also represents the end of his custody of the boy, whose mother in Germany now sends for him, asking Louka to escort him...
...That black hole into which every other production is sucked is here no more than a mote to trouble the mind's eye...
...But people saw they weren't missing anything...
...But soon after his bride leaves for the West to be with her German boyfriend, her mother, in whose care she has left her six-year-old son, Kolya (Andrej Chalimon), has a stroke...
...Louka has given him a child's violin, which pleases the boy immensely, and he is occupied with it when the social worker comes...
...Unfortunately," says Louka...
...He has succeeded brilliantly with Kolya, the Czech entry in this year's Oscar competition for best foreign film...
...At one point the little boy asks him: "Do the Russians live here...
...The music swells, the camera pulls back to show him striking another pose, arms outstretched against a backdrop of the marching Norwegian armies crossing the snowy landscape, and suddenly we realize: Hamlet's made up his mind...
...The poor distracted prince's diseased imagination, somewhere between hysteric and histrionic, is smoothly converted into Branagh's own, much more solidly grounded, theatrical sensibility...
...Eliot noticed a long time ago: namely, that the emotion generated by the language of the play is in excess of anything justified by the action...
...When Russian troops come through the city, Louka's apartment building is decorated with Russian and Czech flags...
...At James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...So, apparently, he set out to provide his fellow-countrymen something decent to watch...
...It's not just another of his attempts to cast himself in a hero's part when he says "from this time forth/My thoughts be BLOODY!—or be nothing worth...
...There, as an example of one of this film's many wonderfully nuanced, un-Branagh moments, we see Louka reach his cello bow towards the woman who sings the 23rd Psalm, andwhom he sometimes sleeps with, as we have seen him do before...
...Like Around the World in 8o Days, this Hamlet is built on the celebrity cameo...
...But the woman is adamant that someone will come to take the boy away soon...
...A cavalcade of Hollywood stars joins the Duke of Marlborough (whose pied a terre at Blenheim Palace is a wildly improbable Elsinore) and demands our admiration for Branagh the impresario...
...As Louka is his only legal family in Czechoslovakia, the authorities bring the boy to him...
...The film's emblematic moment is the "To be or not JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement to be" soliloquy done by Branagh posturing in front of a two-way mirror so that Polonius (Richard Briers) and Claudius (Derek Jacobi) can watch him as he watches himself...
...He means it...
...They were missing garbage...
...Louka gets a job with a very small and very bad spa orchestra...
...E-mail him at 72056.3226@compuserve.com...
...This is because a part of us (a part of me anyway) can't help thinking that Hamlet deserves such treatment...
...It finally happened," the friend who is putting him up says...
...This miracle he accomplishes by himself out-Hamleting Hamlet...
...Jack Lemmon is a hangdog Marcellus, Gerard Depardieu a smoothly Gallic Reynaldo, Billy Crystal a smirking first gravedigger, Robin Williams a hilariously (okay, almost amusingly) campy Osric, John Gielgud a doddery Priam, Judi Dench the o'erteemed Hecuba, and Charlton Heston a Player King who looks a model of reserve and understatement next to Hamlet...
...Or both...
...But gradually they grow more attached...
...I certainly hope it wins, for you will not see a better film, domestic or foreign, this year...
...But I don't suppose the lesson will make much impression on the world's greatest actor...
...At the time the child was first dumped on him, Louka had applied for him to be taken by a foster home, but the bureaucracy has only now ground into action...
...Louka is able to return to Prague, where there are scenes of the great demonstrations that accompanied the fall of the Communists...
...So they run away...
...Louka, too, is smitten to the heart, and from this point on the love between the two continues to deepen as he sees the boy through a serious illness, getting separated on the subway, and so on...
...It is just at the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall...
...Thereafter, Louka talks to him of politics in terms of "ours" and "yours," making clear his dislike of the Russians...
...He takes him everywhere with him, even to work at the crematorium where he plays his cello...
...The two of them can hardly communicate, either, as Louka speaks no Russian and Kolya no Czech...
...Nothing can be mentioned in the text that he does not feel the need to illustrate—so that when, for example, the Prince associates the beckoning ghost with "blasts from hell," damn if the earth doesn't open and fire and smoke belch forth, just in case we might not know what, or where, "hell" is...
...But this time he reaches past her shapely bottom and taps little Kolya's instead, as he stands next to her, to remind him not to lean too far over the gallery railing...
...Additional reviews of current movies by Mr...
...His new, four-hour movie of the play is his latest bid for the title of world's greatest actor, Shakespearean director and entrepreneur...
...He tells Kolya that she is sleeping...
...Louka reluctantly joins in by putting paper flags in his attic window...
...Ken Dodd appears as Yorick in one of the film's many flashbacks (perhaps the most notable of which is a several-times-repeated scene of Branagh and the charming Kate Winslet as Ophelia, in bed together, hard at work disposing of the latter's maiden treasure), and his celebrated crooked teeth are the means by which his skull is recognizable...
...Kolya is delighted: "Ours," he says, pointing to the Russian flag, "and yours," he points to the Czech flag...
...Jan Sverak is only 31 years old and is quoted in the press as saying that "after the Velvet Revolution" in his native Czechoslovakia, "there was a wave of interest in American cinema for about four months...
...They go to the hospital to visit babushka, but Louka is told that she has died...
...A lifelong bachelor (his father had told him that a professional musician must be married only to music) who often sleeps with other men's wives, he undertakes a marriage of convenience with a Russian woman as the only way that he can hope to achieve that new summit of his ambition: enough money to afford a second-hand Trabant...
...It is a play about a self-dramatist, so it is only fitting that it should be done by a self-dramatist...
...Branagh appears, not for the first time, as a man just like Hamlet in his capacity not only, perhaps, for self-deception and self-dramatization but also for self-discovery...
...The problem of Hamlet is solved, and all the time it was as easy as cutting the Gordian knot...
...The idea is ridiculous, but it is hard to hate Branagh quite as much as he deserves 66 March 1997 • The American Spectator for it...
...It is what we might call the Branagh moment, when Shakespeare is forgotten and the play's real hero jumps out at us, inviting us toadmire his cleverness as a director or his grace and beauty as an actor...
...Like me," answers Kolya...
...At first Kolya, recognizing the man's reluctance This Hamlet is a play about a selfdramatist done by a self-dramatist...
...to have him, reacts with hostility...
...A social services worker comes to visit just as the two are celebrating Kolya's birthday—which has been chosen arbitrarily, since he doesn't know when his real birthday is...
...Set in the year before and just after the "Velvet Revolution" of 1989, it tells the story of a disgraced cello player, Frantisek Louka—played by the director's father and the film's screenwriter, Zdenek Sverak — who, after his dismissal from the Czech Philharmonic for political reasons, has undertaken to scrape a living on his cello at weddings and funerals...
...Desperately, Louka tries to explain that things have changed...
...Bowman are available on TAS's web site— httpillwww.spectatotorg...
...For though he aspires to be the Olivier de nos jours (the latter's cinematic Hamlet of 1948 also presented the prince as a bottle-blond), Branagh is something closer to the Mike Todd...
...It just goes to show you that even highly dramatic historical events can be rendered without histrionics and with a subtlety that nevertheless impresses us with their human significance...
...It is a moment of insight as much for us as for Louka, and is followed by another, when Louka overhears Kolya in the bathtub using the gooseneck shower head as a telephone with which he pretends to talk to his babushka...
...There is no "objective correlative" for the undeniably fascinating spectacle of Hamlet's emotional and psychic disintegration...
...The most shameless of all the Branagh moments comes at the "How all occasions do inform against me" soliloquy of Act IV which he, bizarrely, makes into the pivotal moment of the play...
...The flashbacks are also a sign of his obsessively visual imagination...
...It is almost unbearable to watch their parting as Kolya, who at first doesn't even recognize his mother, trots off with her to the rich and free West and Louka returns, with promises to visit, to Prague...
...Readers with long memories may remember my strictures against Mel Gibson's cinematic version of Hamlet six years ago and my view that the play is almost impossible to do convincingly on the stage, let alone on film, for the reason that T.S...
...Most brilliant of all, perhaps, is the idea of including a part for Yorick, the court jester who has been dead for twenty-three years...
...This is a post-modern Hamlet, a Hamlet watching himself watching not only the court of Elsinore and the players from Wittenberg but also Ken Branagh's directorial genius and fine figure as an actor...
...Well, here's the good news about Branagh's Hamlet: he has found a way to make a weird kind of sense of the play's central incoherence...
...He is even able to rejoin the Philharmonic, and he plays at the great moment when the old and frail Rafael Kubelik, long an exile, returns to conduct at an outdoor concert...
...F or the Movie of the Month we turn to another brilliant young man, but one who is also gifted with a measure of taste and subtlety...
Vol. 30 • March 1997 • No. 3
