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movie: Ophelia
A few days after seeing Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet, we went to see "Ophelia" last night. As the title suggests, it's the same story told through Ophelia's eyes. (Spoiler: she's still alive to tell the tale; if you're familiar with other Shakespeare plays you can guess how.) Shakespeare's play isn't set in any particular time, just a vague Elizabethan idea of "medieval", and the movie is likewise set in the 19th-century Middle Ages of Ivanhoe and the Pre-Raphaelites (of whom Ophelia was always a favorite character). The movie intersects with the play frequently, including a lot of the same lines, but the lines mean something completely different in light of what we see in the movie that isn't in the play; I thought that very clever. The final bloodbath scene is fairly similar, except for one crucial detail of who kills whom.
There were some nice 14th-or-15th-century touches, like Queen Gertrude drinking from a small glass prunted beaker, a musician playing a rebec with a long, asymmetrically convex bow, and a couple of actual medieval-or-Renaissance pieces of music (we noticed at least Palestinalied and Ballo dei Fiori). And every piece of music was converted into duple-duple meter, I guess to make things sound more rocky. Medieval composers were so fond of hemiola, the ambiguity between duple-triple and triple-duple, that if you want to make your movie sound not medieval, there are few easier ways to do it than to completely avoid triple meter. Which is OK: the film-makers weren't trying to do a high-authenticity period piece, and what they were trying to do they did well.
There were some nice 14th-or-15th-century touches, like Queen Gertrude drinking from a small glass prunted beaker, a musician playing a rebec with a long, asymmetrically convex bow, and a couple of actual medieval-or-Renaissance pieces of music (we noticed at least Palestinalied and Ballo dei Fiori). And every piece of music was converted into duple-duple meter, I guess to make things sound more rocky. Medieval composers were so fond of hemiola, the ambiguity between duple-triple and triple-duple, that if you want to make your movie sound not medieval, there are few easier ways to do it than to completely avoid triple meter. Which is OK: the film-makers weren't trying to do a high-authenticity period piece, and what they were trying to do they did well.