As a follow-up to their recent edition of Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet (1964), Facets has now released Kozintsev's King Lear (1971), long awaited both by fans of Shakespeare film and of Soviet cinema. The disc represents a welcome improvement over their edition of Hamlet..

Kozintsev's King Lear offers as bleak a final vision as you're likely to find in any director's output. (Kozintsev passed away in 1973). Above all, he is concerned to make his King Lear effective cinema. For example, a verbal reference to dogs in the play is translated on the screen as unsettling close-ups of snarling, vicious hounds. Together with his cinematographer, the remarkably talented Jonas Gritsius from Lithuania, he again chooses to shoot in black-and-white and widescreen, this time all the better to emphasize the hostile, empty landscape around his characters at key moments in the drama. The production design captures the grime and grit of early Europe, not unlike Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966).

All the performances are excellent, but the core of the film is obviously Jüri Järvet as Lear. (The DVD cover mistakenly spells his name as "Yuri Yarvet," transliterating from the Russian.) The Estonian actor has piercingly intense eyes and a frail, diminutive physical presence, giving his is figure unique poignancy in the film. Another example of how Kozintsev cannily uses casting to enliven his onscreen characters is the handsome and charismatic Regimantas Adomajtis as Gloucester's illegitimate son Edmund and the future object of Goneril's lust.

Dmitri Shostakovich's well-regarded score is indeed brilliant from a musical standpoint, but there was one point that annoyed me: we see the fool playing a simple wooden flute, which Shostakovich represents musically with the clarinet. To be sure, the clarinet is a Shostakovich instrument par excellence, with its overtones of melancholy and sardonic humor, but at that point the music asserts its own personality too aggressively and takes you out of the film.

This King Lear is a compelling piece of cinema and a more than worthy Shakespeare adaptation, but for me it finally doesn't capture the full range of emotions available in Shakespeare's play. King Lear is not just bleak existential tragedy, but also delicious villainy and a great deal of bawdy humor. In that regard, I prefer Joseph Papp's vivid 1974 Shakespeare in the Park production starring James Earl Jones. Jones's terrifying, mad rages as Lear dwarf Järvet's performance in comparison, though Järvet is still excellent on his own terms in a performance scaled for the big screen.

Facet's transfer of King Lear looks significantly better than the one for Hamlet, partly because this time they use a dual layer disc to give the main feature enough breathing room in terms of the bit rate. This time, they also provide removable English subtitles--a big plus--but the 2.35:1 widescreen image is once again not a 16X9 anamorphic transfer. As a result, the image looks very good on a regular picture tube but may not be as sharp when blown up in projection.

The sole special feature on the disc is an hour-long interview with the theater and opera director Peter Sellars, who's certainly one of the most talented figures of the stage today. (Those who have had the good fortune to see a live production of the opera Nixon and China can attest to this.) While he clearly loves the film and knows a great deal about theater in general, I have to question his basic assumption about the underlying subversive intent of the film. First, contrary to what Sellars suggests, Shakespeare was staged in the Soviet Union before this, including during the Stalin era. Kozintsev himself staged productions of King Lear (1943) and Othello (1943) and Hamlet (1954), and there were other Shakespeare films produced during the Fifties and Sixties before Kozintsev's screen version of Hamlet appeared. Not only that, but by emphasizing the presence of the "abject masses" in the opening images of the film, Kozintsev seems to be pointing toward a interpretation of the play that is more or less in keeping with conventional Soviet interpretations of Shakespeare and other literary figures. Either way, Kozintsev's film does not have to be "subversive" to be good.

Also, Sellars also overstates the political dimension of using non-Russian actors such as Jüri Järvet, an Estonian, and Donatas Banionis, a Lithuanian, in leading roles. It's probably true that the ethnic Russians, who constituted the largest segment of the population, had a marked preference for Russian actors, but a number of non-Russian films received Union-wide distribution, and some became universally popular. One example of this was the Lithuanian drama No One Wanted to Die (1965), which starred Banionis and was photographed by Jonas Gritsius. After the success of that film, Banionis was invited to take on lead roles in Russian-produced films such as Eldar Ryazanov's Watch Out for the Car (1966) and later Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972). Despite such reservations, the interview is obviously worth watching, and Sellars' enthusiasm is infectious.

The disc also contains a booklet with background notes on some of the figures involved in the production and an excerpt from Kozintsev's own writings. Overall, this is a good DVD package, and the film itself is absolutely worth seeing if you're not already familiar with it.

For more information about King Lear, visit Facets Multi-Media. To order King Lear, go to TCM Shopping.

by James Steffen