2 thoughts on “Much Ado About Nothing (1993)

  1. ruiresende says:

    She wooed the whole film 😛

    I also liked it (I had already seen the film). The play is probably the first “romantic comedy”/date movie, as we understand it today, with all the necessary plot points:

    -boy meets girl;
    -boy falls in love with girl, girl falls in love with boy
    -momentary happiness
    -something bad happens, either by misunderstanding or deliberate misconduct from someone
    -redemption, clarification of what went wrong, with a public manifestation of love on all parts. happy end

    This is what you find in pretty much any common date movie. But of course here we have Shakespeare, so the language is better and the narrative devices are all better pulled off, and the whole structure makes sense:

    -masked parties where no one knows to whom they are speaking, where messages can, because of that, be misunderstood;
    -dialogues intended to be overheard by someone who doesn’t know he is being framed
    -momentary breaking of happiness through deceit (John the Bastard) by showing a sex scene which is not exactly what it looks like;
    -the undoing of all the mistakes comes through a “masked” wedding, again with a bride who is not who she was told to be, after the lie came out that she was actually dead.
    -even the title denounces the thing “…about nothing”. Nothing sounded like Noting in Shakespeare’s days, and “noting” meant something like gossip in modern english. the title is not exactly what it sounds…

    Happiness comes to everybody when the misunderstandings are undone, the mischiefs found out, the liars punished. The story of the characters evolves paralell to the inner structures of the play. that´s the beauty of it.

    But this is a play, theatre, which means we, viewers, can´t be deceived the way the characters are. Only cinema would give writers that chance and nowadays it is pretty standard that sometimes we see stuff that later we will find out to be wrong. What a screenwriter Shakespeare would have been…

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