![]() ![]() This is the main difference and yet what makes it special and unique to this film adaptation of The Tempest. Because, yes, in the film there’s no Prospero, but Prospera (interpreted by Hellen Mirren). But not the love between Ferdinand and Miranda, which is something as spontaneous and vertiginous as the love between Romeo and Juliet – but without the death of the two lovers-, but love between mother and daughter. Despite the differences between the film and the play, which are significant, this film is probably one of the best adaptations of The Tempest that have been made: the themes remain the same as those as we can perceive in the play (betrayal, colonialism, the desire of justice, revenge versus forgiveness, and the force of nature and magic), but in the film there’s a theme we do not see as clearly -or at least, with such force- as we see in the film: love. This first analysis focuses on a comparative study between the play The Tempest by William Shakespeare and the 2010 film version of that play directed and written by Julie Taymor. The movie is an ambitious experiment, but a long and tedious one, and our revels end long before Mazursky's.We will be talking about two very different adaptations of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. When the movie works, it works in spite of, and entirely apart from, the Shakespeare connection-in a quiet little scene, for example, when Cassavetes and Sarandon first fall in love. Meanwhile, Rowlands takes up with a wealthy king of industry ( Vittorio Gassman, as Alonzo), and when Alonzo's party comes looking for the runaways, Cassavetes calls down a mighty storm upon their heads, and they are shipwrecked on his island.Īll of this is painfully labored. Cassavetes goes to the Greek islands for a vacation with his daughter, and meets a young woman named Aretha (read Ariel), played by Susan Sarandon.Īll three spirit themselves off to an isolated island, where Cassavetes grows dotty, peers through his telescopes, wears magician's pajamas and casts spells. ![]() Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands play an architect and an actress whose marriage is coming apart. He handled this milieu brilliantly in " An Unmarried Woman," and now he handles it awkwardly. Mazursky's story is another one of those affluent-urbanite-in-turmoil sagas. Contrast this film with "Forbidden Planet," a science fiction film that also begins with the underlying materials of "The Tempest," but transforms them into its own terms so cleverly that most viewers remained unaware of its inspiration. There's nothing wrong with taking a classic work of literature as a starting-point for a contemporary work, but Mazursky hasn't absorbed "The Tempest" in his "Tempest" he has simply staged it. The whole movie suffers from the same curious sense of displacement. It's all the more off-putting that the present day Philip and Kalibanos could never have such a conversation. Because we remember Shakespeare, we are acutely aware that the dialogue between Cassavetes and Julia is a paraphrase. But it's even worse if we're running a parallel track in our memory, recalling the pathos of Shakespeare's Caliban, the monster who existed without beauty in his life, and was introduced to it only to have it snatched away. There is no sense in which this scene works. ![]()
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