Korol Lir / King Lear (1971)

This is a screen adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy. King Lear had three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. One day he banished and repudiated his youngest and most loved daughter. But the evil elder sisters betrayed their father and blinded him. Having lost not only his kingdom, but even a plain shelter, the old Lear, accompanied by his loyal jester, had finally seen the light of truth and was reunited with Cordelia who was not afraid to share her father’s fate

Directors: Grigori Kozintsev, Iosif Shapiro
Cast: Jüri Järvet, Elza Radzina, Galina Volchek, Valentina Shendrikova, Oleg Dal, Karlis Sebris, Leonhard Merzin, Regimantas Adomaitis, Vladimir Yemelyanov, Aleksandr Vokach, Donatas Banionis, Aleksei Petrenko, Juozas Budraitis, Roman Gromadsky, Nikolai Kuzmin, Ants Lauter, Ignat Leirer, Konstantin Tyagunov, Emmanuil Vitorgan
Writing credits: Grigori Kozintsev, Boris Pasternak, William Shakespeare
Original Music by Dmitri Shostakovich
Cinematography by Jonas Gritsius

Subtitles : Russian, English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Hebrew, Chinese, Arabic, Swedish

DVD Distributor : Ruscico

IMDB

Korol Lir was the last film of Kozintsev's long career, which began with the delirious experimentalism of the early 1920s and ended with two towering adaptations of Shakespeare. His version of Hamlet is probably the better-known of the two, but some critics have considered his Lear even finer. In its austere grandeur the film conveys, more effectively perhaps than any stage production could ever do, the majestic stature of the play, extending it to its utmost range without in the least distorting it. Kozintsev's Lear remains, with all its gritty strength, still very much Shakespeare's Lear.

"This is not the story of one man," Kozintsev commented; "everything occurs among many other people." His aim is to place Lear in context, showing that the schemes and caprices of royalty bring disaster not only to themselves, but also to the whole nation. In the opening sequence a meandering procession of ragged vagabonds (immediately recalling the line of suppliants winding through the snow in Ivan the Terrible) make their painful way to Lear's castle. Later, as war and destruction rage across the stark landscape, the entire populace of Britain seems to have been reduced to such scurrying wretchedness, with the king himself merely one among their number. The closing scenes take place amid the scorched and shattered ruins of Dover, whose inhabitants continue while Lear dies to forage gloomily among the rubble, indifferent to one more death after so many.

Pictorially the film is consistently superb. Kozintsev deploys his widescreen monochrome photography to impressive effect, creating panoramic compositions which echo the elemental forces unleashed by the play. In one vivid overhead shot, the camera even seems to become one with the elements as it glares down on the cowering figures of Lear and the Fool stumbling blindly across the storm-swept heath. At other times it identifies with the king in his changing moods, sweeping vertiginously upwards with him to the mad heights of the battlements, or panning slowly across a darkening horizon as if in apprehension of the coming storm.

In the title role, the Estonian actor Yuri Yarvet is imaginatively cast: a diminutive, bird-like man with quick eyes, he seems at first almost childishly unfitted for kingship, yet by the end of the film has acquired a touchingly frail nobility, transcending his own inadequacies as he gains in understanding. The other roles are equally individually characterised, drawing on a wealth of personal detail, from the gossipy fussiness of Gloucester to the Fool's crop-haired innocence. Pasternak's sinewy translation audibly recaptures, even for those with no Russian, the rhythms and inflection of Shakespeare's verse; while in its power and energy, Shostakovich's music (the last of his many outstanding film scores) perfectly complements Kozintsev's epic conception of the play.

There are no compromises in Korol Lir. In its visual style it is thoroughly Russian, very much Kozintsev. (The hand of the director of New Babylon, 40 years earlier, is clearly evident.) It conforms to a Marxist reading of the text, but without being in any way doctrinaire, nor perverting Shakespeare's intentions. Along with Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, and Kozintsev's own Hamlet, it provides a rare example of a Shakespeare film that succeeds in being at once superb cinema and superb Shakespeare.