Midsummer Night's Dream, A (1999)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999), directed by Michael Hoffman.
First review
I remember not liking this version very much, but it has grown on me over the years. I still think the fairy tavern scene near the beginning is a low point of old-TV-style bad comedy, but the jumble of acting styles throughout no longer bothers me. MSND is meant to be a zany kaleidoscope of themes.
Any good production must cover these points:
Must be funny, which always requires skill. Comedy is harder than it looks. You can go for cheap laughs, but the superior production finds bittersweet humor in the human condition: love, pride, ambition, etc.
The language has to be presented to modern audiences. It's customary to cut much of it. This is one of Shakespeare's early plays and we can imagine him with a mythology reference book at his elbow, eager to establish his learning. The text is a bit stiff and the actors have to make us understand its meaning.
The four young lovers: who ever remembers which is which? They tend to forget themselves during that bewitched night in the woods. The play requires one of the girls to be taller than the other, but that is their only distinguishing feature. All four have to be both attractive and ridiculous. In this film: there is something spitefully funny about dunking beautiful young people in a mud puddle.
Must have a tone of magical weirdness, not serious but neither easily discounted. Our waking minds don't believe in the fairies, but who knows what images the sleeping self and subconscious entertain? Both characters and audience are disoriented.
The audience can mock the performance of "Pyramus and Thisby" but by the end they must be brought around and become a little misty. Duke Theseus has advice for critics: "The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them."
Bottom the Weaver is the heart of the story. This film does something I don't remember seeing before: even before the magic, his friends watch him and seem concerned for his mental state. At the end, and for the rest of his life, he will have vague memories and fragmentary dreams of the night he was loved by Titania, queen of the fairies.
Bottom is used for some gentle jibing at human aspirations. Youthful desires tend toward the excessive -- just look at heavy metal lyrics. We dream of omnipotence and immortality. Having discovered sex we yearn for better sex, for ever more exultant encounters.
In folklore the fairies can deliver all of that, but it is perilous to accept their gifts because they are full of tricks. And yet: Bottom spends a whole night with them without coming to harm because he brings no harm with him. The Fairy Queen intends seduction, but he's more interested in chatting with her minions.
"Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream". Our desire for the excessive makes us asses.
Finally, the play-within-a-play is often used by Shakespeare, but here at the end Puck suggests yet another level, that the whole thing has been a dream: "If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumb'red here / While these visions did appear. / And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream..."
Rich casting, although some -- like Sophie Marceau -- are rather wasted and given little to do.
The young folk are fine, with the exception of a strangely wooden Christian Bale.
Rupert Everett and Michelle Pfeiffer are the warring fairy royalty; I think I have to give him points for erotic potency.
Kevin Kline gives his all for Bottom and does a good job, making him both funny and endearing, which is the whole point.
Good use of Italian opera themes in the score. The Mendelssohn hearkens back to Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935).
Available on DVD, 4:3 letterboxed in the US, which is the source of my thumbnails. Needs an upgrade. Anamorphic PAL editions are available.
Second review
Watching an imported Blu-ray makes me like this even more. This is a case where the drastic upgrade in image quality reveals beauty and depth in the composition I had not seen before. A transformation: even the actors all seem better.
Notes:
We see Lysander buying two bicycles in the marketplace, preparing for his nighttime getaway with his lady love.
In Bottom's first appearance an ass passes in front of him, a preview of his later transformation.
Bottom carries a fine cane, a sign of his yearning for gentility above his station.
The fairies have funny bits stealing and leaning new technology: bikes and phonographs.
The magic red flower used to induce love: the next morning we see them growing everywhere.
More Mendelssohn: the familiar "Wedding March" is also from his 1843 "A Midsummer Night's Dream".
The Blu-ray is a region B import from Germany, the "FilmConfect" label. With English audio and subtitles and a few instances of burned-in German subtitles.
This is a lovely presentation, "film-like" as we used to say. It makes the North American non-anamorphic DVD look very sad by comparison. I've seen no sign of a region A upgrade.
The thumbnails are from the Blu-ray.
