- Year: 2001
- Genre: drama, fantasy, short
- Director: Anthony Minghella
- Cast: Alan Rickman, Juliet Stevenson, Kristin Scott Thomas
- Plot: Film adaptation of a play by Samuel Beckett. The land is filled with people in urns chattering at top speed, but only to themselves, not to one another. The focus goes to three people: a man, his mistress and his wife.
For this particular interpretation of the play, it is assumed that the action takes place in Hell, perhaps in reference to Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous assertion, ‘Hell is—other people’ though T. S. Eliot’s rebuttal, “Hell is oneself,” is probably more accurate. In this filmed version, the action is set in a vast landscape of “urn people”, all speaking at once. “This [interpretation] was much turned over, along with doubts whether it should be there at all, in animated discussions that went on throughout the Barbican meeting places.”
A camera is used instead of a stage light to provoke the characters into action; Minghella uses a jump cut editing technique to make it seem as though there are even more than two repetitions of the text. He “made the equipment into a threatening force by switching it with bullying speed from one face to another, forcing unusual speed of delivery for the actors. Juliet Stevenson told [Katharine Worth] that during rehearsals she had wondered whether the lines were being delivered too fast for viewers to take in their sense [but] theatre critic, Alice Griffin … thought that the lines ‘came across more clearly and more easily understandable than sometimes in the theatre.’ This she attributed partly to Minghella’s use of close-up, a recurring feature of the film versions naturally enough.”
The postmodern outlook of the film (“a field of urns in a dismal swamp, a gnarled, blasted oak in the background, a lowering, Chornobyl sky”) was however criticized by The Guardian’s Art critic Adrian Searle as “adolescent, and worse, clichéd and illustrational,” adding: “Any minute, expect a dragon”. It is also perhaps noteworthy that this version does not feature the last section of the script, in which the characters almost embark upon a third cycle of the text.
Source: Wikipedia
