Twelfth Night (1996)
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1996 Ben Hoffman
The use of twins as a tool for a plot in farce or semi-farce is not new. It goes back before Shakespeare who some 400 years ago employed it in the most popular of his works, TWELFTH NIGHT. While this is a comedy, like all good comedies there is a lot of truth in it. In this case Shakespeare examined the man that is in most women and the woman who is in most men.
And here is how he did it: Look-alike twins Viola (Imogen Stubbs) and her brother Sebastian (Steven Mackintosh) are separated when a ship on which they are cruising is wrecked off the coast of the imaginary country of Ilyria. Coming ashore, Viola is convinced that her brother must have drowned.
Viola discovers that she is near the home of a young countess, Olivia, (Helena Bonham Carter) who has sworn not to have anything to do with men for seven years because both her father and brother recently died. Duke Orsino (Toby Stephens) is in love with her but she rejects any of his advances.
Alone and unknown in this new country of Ilyria, Viola changes her name to Cesario when she decides her safety lies in disguising herself as a boy, which consists not only in wearing a fake mustache but in learning how to ride a horse, fence, smoke and play billiards. The truth is her disguise would not have fooled anyone except in a comedy where it is OK to suspend reality. "He" then gets himself a job with the Duke Orsino where his first assignment is to woo the countess on Orsino's behalf. . . but Olivia gets a bit of a crush, to her surprise, on the slender boyish-looking Cesario, as Viola falls for Orsino . . . while the plot thickens.
Let us not forget that twin Sebastian is not dead and shows up one fine day to further complicate that triangle of Cesario, Countess Olivia and Duke Orsino. All this time, the Countess' household is having its own love battles as Malvolio (Nigel Hawthorne, whom you will remember as the king in THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE) and, others are involved in their own chicanery. Throughout all of this, there is a strolling minstrel, Feste, played to perfection by the amazing Ben Kingsley who has enthralled us ever since he hit the screens as GHANDI way back in 1982 when he won an Oscar for Best Performing Actor, as well as everything else he has been in since. This performance should get him a Best Supporting nomination. This being a comedy we must expect that all's well that ends well.
Directed by Trevor Dunn who has been doing Shakespeare for 18 years.
3.5 bytes
4 Bytes = Superb 3 Bytes = Too good to miss 2 Bytes = Average 1 Byte = Save your money
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews