Today you might say “Spring is here”, but in Vermont, before Spring comes mud season. That’s reality and there was plenty of mud underfoot, but today was a beautiful warm day. The snow and ice are melting away. The sun was warm and I spent the late afternoon on the porch, reading the Sunday paper and knitting.
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It goes without saying, IMHO, that everyone should love Shakespeare. So if you love Shakespeare as you should, and dramatic movies, and extraordinary acting, here’s a Netflix movie for you: King Lear, in Russian, released in 1971, directed by Grigori Kozintsev, with a screenplay/translation by Boris Pasternak and a score by Dmitri Shostakovich – two other giants of the arts in the Soviet Union. I kid you not. This is not a stage-director's Lear. This is a movie-maker’s Lear, in a bleak and ugly setting surrounding a play full of bleak and ugly relationships. Kozintsev survived Stalin’s regime, noted for the Gulags, the purging of artists and intellectuals, and Stalin’s egomania and ruthlessness. The movie certainly draws some parallels to those days.
If you don’t know the play you need to read a basic plot outline of it – Wikipedia would be your best choice – or you will be lost (thanks to inadequate sub-titling, and an assumption that a viewer will know the play). You will be especially lost if you don’t know about the subplot of the Duke of Gloucester and his two sons, Edmund and Edgar.
Briefly, a selfish, contemptous king turns his kingdom over to two daughters (and exiles the third one), and those two daughters rain the same contempt upon him that they had experienced at his hands. Lear loses his mind, then regains it, and is eventually reunited with his third (loving) daughter, but nothing goes well for anyone in this great tragedy.
Yüri Yärvet, the Estonian actor who plays Lear, is extraordinary. (Wikipedia says he was a tall man. If you look carefully at the film, you’ll see he is quite short.) Lear demonstrates every emotion a human can experience and this actor brings all those emotions to life. By the middle of the film this Lear has learned compassion and at the end, impoverished and a prisoner, he has learned gratitude. When he and Cordelia are being led off, surrounded by soldiers, he talks to her about how they will live their lives in prison and you would think he and his daughter were the only two people in the world. It is stunning acting, and could bring you to tears. If I told you about all the stunning moments I'd spoil the movie for you. All the fine acting is enhanced by extraordinary (B/W) cinematography.
The first DVD that Netflix sent failed in the middle of the play. I sent it back with my fingers crossed, and the replacement DVD was perfect. You should see this movie. It’s an amazing experience.