Twelfth Night

A ship goes down. Viola comes ashore believing her twin brother Sebastian has drowned. She is in a strange country, alone and unprotected. She cuts her hair, dresses as a man and enters the service of Count Orsino under the name Cesario. Orsino loves Olivia; Olivia is in mourning and will receive nobody. Orsino sends Cesario as his messenger. Olivia falls in love with the messenger. Viola is in love with Orsino. Then Sebastian turns up alive and nobody knows who anybody is. Trevor Nunn directs and adapted the screenplay from Shakespeare's play. Helena Bonham Carter, Imogen Stubbs, Richard E. Grant, Nigel Hawthorne, Ben Kingsley and Imelda Staunton are in the cast. It is a British production. Nunn worked for many years with the Royal Shakespeare Company and had directed the play on stage as well. The adaptation moves the events to the end of the nineteenth century and the costumes belong to that period. The matter it treats is identity; the comedy of disguise keeps clouding who is in love with whom. Malvolio, played by Nigel Hawthorne, is as painful as he is funny; the film turns the joke played on him into cruelty. Ben Kingsley plays the fool and sings the songs. The adaptation cuts the text but does not modernise the language. It was shot on the Cornish coast and the locations are real. The ending brings the couples together without leaving everyone happy. Its limit is the language; the first half hour is hard for anyone unused to Shakespeare's text, and the pace is slow. Who it is for: viewers who like Shakespeare adaptations and British period films. Who it is not for: the language is heavy, the pace slow, and the ending rueful.