I’m so confused!
I don’t know if I just saw a corny musical, a Shakespeare play, a strip club dance number, or a war film.
I just finished watching “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” which is a Kenneth Branagh film, a remake of the Shakespeare play. I really was not expecting what I got.
The basic story is that the King of Navarre and his three best friends make a vow that they will stay in college for three years and devote themselves entirely to study, and that no woman will enter the court until those three years are up. There are other restrictions, such as fasting and so forth, but it’s the lack of women thing that really has these guys wondering if they’ve made the right decision. But the King needs to be prepared to lead his kingdom and can only do that through study, and his good friends are by his side. All is going well until the Princess of France shows up, along with her three handmaids, and then all their plans go awry.
This version is set just before the start of World War II, and is a musical. Imagine my surprise when Kenneth ends his stirring Shakespearean speech and breaks out in dance. Yeah, that caught me off guard for a minute. Then there was singing. I blinked several times, trying to accustom myself to the idea of a 1940s musical Shakespeare play, and decided to just go with it. I can do weird, right?
Well, the four men determine to give up on their oath. As Kenneth so eloquently quotes Shakespeare, what good is education without women to lend beauty to the experience? Sending gifts and trinkets to the women, who they have not allowed into the court but instead have ensconced in tents on the grounds, they decide to come a-wooing. And here’s where it got really strange. The men have planned a masked ball and they are planning to identify their ladies by the trinkets they sent earlier that day. The Princess (Alicia Silverstone) suggests that the ladies trade trinkets to play a trick on the men. Well, I’d really recommend you use your handy-dandy remote over the next scene. The men show up in their masks, and they do dance with the ladies. If I can use the word “dance.” Speaking as circumspectly as I can, Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Gray had nothin’ on these guys for dirty dancing. Moving on . . .
The men find out they’ve been tricked and don’t seem too embarrassed that they spent the entire evening in very close proximity to the wrong women. But then news comes that the Princess’s father has died, and she must leave immediately. Each of the women tell the men that if they can wait until the prescribed period of mourning is over, they will all end up together.
But then in another strange plot twist, World War II starts and they all go to war, the men to fly bombing runs and the women to wait for them. And then the movie ends. The whole thing was punctuated by newsclips reminiscent of Movie Tone News reels that used to play just before the film in the old theaters.
I honestly can’t say if I liked the film or not. There were elements of it that I liked. There were elements that made me slightly uncomfortable, and some that made me even more uncomfortable, but we already talked about that. I did laugh out loud a few times, especially when, carried away by love, the men floated up to the ceiling while singing about their ladies.
So let’s see, if you’re in the mood for a corny Shakespeare rip-off that will remind you somewhat of a high school musical, you might try this one. On the other hand, you might not.
This film was rated PG.
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