Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost (2000)

A new spin on the old song and dance.

A scholarly king and his three companions swear off the society of women for three years, only to have a diplomatic visit from a French princess and her three ladies-in-waiting thwart their intentions.

Date of release
2000-03-31
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (82)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Comedy, Music, Romance
Director
Kenneth Branagh

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost is a 2000 British musical romantic comedy film written, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, based on the comic play of the same name by William Shakespeare. The first feature film to be made of this lesser-known comedy, Branagh's fourth film of a Shakespeare play was a box-office and critical disappointment.

Production

Branagh became interested in the play during his 1984 season with the Royal Shakespeare Company, when he had played the King of Navarre. From that period, he was familiar with Harley Granville-Barker's famous essay arguing that Love's Labour's Lost could be treated as highly stylised, with the dialogue and action treated with an almost musical sense of rhythm.

Branagh cast the film without much regard for singing or dancing ability; as in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, the film was meant to highlight energy and enthusiasm rather than smooth competence. Of the cast, only Nathan Lane was known primarily for musical work. Preproduction was dominated by rigorous dancing and singing coaching.

Branagh reversed the philosophy he had used with Hamlet (that is, to keep every word of the original), and instead made major cuts in the play's text. The released version retains only about a quarter of Shakespeare's lines; although Branagh managed to include all seventeen of the original speaking roles, some (most notably among the lower-class characters) are cut almost to nothing.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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