Hamlet
2009: Simon Bowler

This has been available for a while for viewing on the Amazon website, and is finally available on DVD.

Its main claim to fame seems to be that it’s made according to the “Dogme 95” methodology of some European filmmakers, though that's something of an exaggeration, perhaps: normally dogme film exploits natural environments and eschews staged settings or artificial light. This has all the characteristics of a stage production — dark, but on a kind of neutral “black-box” stage, without anything that would pass for a set, with harsh spot-lighting on the actors. One of the tenets of dogme is that the film must be in color; this is nominally so, but the lighting is so extreme as to produce a virtual black-and-white tonality. Dogme also stipulates that the director should never be credited. To this sometime paradox, Simon Bowler applies Dogme 95’s cinéma-verite hand-held camera work.

As far as it goes, it’s an interesting production. It’s barely an hour and a quarter long, though, and hence it’s hard to take it as anything approaching a complete Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up about fifteen minutes into the play. There are occasional arbitrary intrusions (e.g., Hamlet singing “Rule, Britannia” after he’s been sent to England), but ultimately, for all its strangeness, it does take the Hamlet narrative seriously, and that sets it head and shoulders above many other productions one could point to.

In practical terms, this functions chiefly as a repository of the more famous speeches in the play. They are, by and large, creditably delivered. David Melville renders Hamlet’s own speeches with a certain amount of energy and nuance. Bernadette Sullivan’s Gertrude has both dignity and vulnerability that surpasses many more complete performances. Ophelia appears only for one painful scene before her death is announced, but it’s well-played. We see nothing of her madness, which is, I think, important to the overall flow of the play. Claudius has both gravity and superb diction.

I can certainly recommend this as a source of gobbets Hamlet that can be scrutinized for local insight; if one knows the play, the missing continuity can be provided from the viewer’s memory. But one must not take it for the real thing.