Adapted from Maggie O’farrell’s novel 2020 with the same name, “Hammen“Is an emotionally powdery drama that imagines how William Shakespeare’s and Anne death (or Agnes) Hathaway’s only son may have inspired the creation of his greatest tragedy; Think of it as “Shakespeare in anxiety.” And yet the violent beauty of this filmWho rips your soul out of your chest so completely that its seismic grief almost feels like falling in love or becoming a parent, is that it is as much about the experience of having a child as it is about the experience of losing one.
More to the point, the “port” is a diverse story about how these two experiences – so countless in dignity – in the end can be catalyzed by the same process of emotional transfiguration. In the first, your heart is placed in someone else’s body. In the other, that body is supported in the world. Creating something, whether it is a person or a game, is to give a piece of yourself your own life; A life that you will never be able to control or stay safe again. It is to risk the infinite potential for an offer over the unborn reality of an idea and to accept how even something looks like you can grow to adopt unthinkable forms. The author dies so that their work can be reborn again.
In that light, one of the great forces in O’Farrell’s novel is how the easily historical context it invents around “Hamlet” refuses to adapt to the paragraph’s general plot and most obvious themes, and Chloé Zhao’s film-which she co-operated with the author-respected how the 2+2 = 5 approach asks for another type. Unlike “Shakespeare in Love” (a masterpiece), “Solo: A Star Wars Story” (not so much), or any other examples of modern origin stories, “The Harbor” does not repent of its drama from things of its ultra -less source material. Sure, there’s a brief aside in which will (paul mescal) jots down the balcony scene from “romeo and juliet” after his first kiss with agnes (jessie buckley), and a late moment where their three children roleplay as witches Never does this movie rely on the lizard-brain thrill of recognition in order to stand on the shoulders of giants.
On the contrary, the “port” derives its simple but overwhelming force from the connection between intention and response; It is a movie that plants its roots in the limal space between them and strongly observes how the same type of no man’s land can be formed between a man and a wife as easily as it does between an artist and their work. With that action, it would be difficult to imagine a more appropriate tribute to Shakespeare’s most interpreted games.
When the story begins in 1580, Will and Agnes are both arrested self -insured. He is a poor and rough Latin supervisor whose interest in words, words, makes him an “useless” disappointment for his dominant father (like Agnes’s severe mother -in -law played by Emily Watson, Will’s father is not hateful to his oldest child as much as he is afraid to love him, so that the world does not decide to take him back). She is a mysterious “Forest Witch” whose fascination for Falconry and a broader attraction to communicate with the non-human world-makes she stand out from her family even more than the blood-red dress she wears in a world of medieval gray. Will abandon their students at first sight of Agnes who runs at the classroom window, and the two suck faces a minute later. She makes him feel fuzzy, and he makes her feel intended. (Will suggests Agnes by circling her as a child who plays duck, duck, goose, a fun piece of blockage in a movie that is always careful to let enough light shine through its potentially oppressive darkness). They each see a vision of the world in the other.
Of course, Zhao’s signature serves naturalism Agnes well. We first see her curled in the tree in Hollow where she will eventually give birth to her oldest daughter, and the elementary nature of łukasz żals kinematography allows her to maintain that feeling of earthly wherever she goes. Through a similar token, the strong visual language-complicated by Zhao’s stately framing and related inclination towards surveillance-like internal shoots that suggest the presence of a ghost looking down-helps to desabuse the drama for any staginess. Ditto Den Plainspoken dialogue, the wind moaning outside the Shakespeare family’s house as an empty stomach, and the sensitive Max Richter score that does not penetrate drama until the film’s nuclear power party of a finale, which skirts dangerously close emotional pornography as zhao leads to the componence. (Tear-printers come and go, but it is rare to see a movie that feels like it is growing you for moisture.)
Anyway, for a fictional story of famous historical figures, the “port” is unusually adapted to the base’s immediacy of their emotions. With actors like these at Zhao’s disposal, it would have been a huge waste for the film to focus on everything else. Anchored by the primordial rawness of Buckley’s astonishing performance, the “port” is never at least the risk of reducing Agnes to a tropa. If anything, the movie sees her as an even more powerful creative force than her husband; Will Scribbles plays off the screen while Agnes sweats, screams at all fours and shouts at fate when she gives birth to their three children.
The children grow up to embody the best of their parents, with Zhao who pay special attention to the ties between the twins harbor and Judith (Jacobi Jupe and Olivia Lynes, both fantastic), who play together by changing identity and trying to deceive their parents. Of course, it is a fun Shakespearean flourishing, but one that remains here for the relaxed feeling of transmission that it seeds for the semi -fantastic heart feeling that follows when the port is to voluntarily absorb its sister’s plague. Without exaggeration, the image of the cherubic eight -year -old boy who is lost in Bardo is against a background of painted trees among the most devastating things I have ever seen in a movie (where did he go?), And I spent the remaining hour with the “harbor” feeling as if the weight of death itself crushed on my breasts.
Zhao is careful not to gild Liljan (the “on daylight” Needledrop despite), but her Shakespeare does not need exactly a lot of landing track to make his loss feel like your own. Between “Aftersun”, “All us strangers” and the coming “The History of Sound”, no actor has for the past five years made me cry more than Paul Mescal – not because he is so damn playing wounded, but rather because he is even better at playing the injury to someone who does not know how to heal themselves.
His performance in “The Port” is so Catartically Transcenent as it finally rewards that search, a search that extends here beyond this world – unless the world – which will start looking for his son in space between life and death. The smoothness of English drama’s most famous speech allows suicide dilemma to “be, or not to be” to double as an invitation to reject its binary suggestions, since the film does not invoke it until it is clear that – as far as his increasingly foreign parents are worried – the poor port is creature and not be at once. He is not there, but he is not Not there either. “He may not only have disappeared,” she and her overly separated husband both agree, even though they have very different ideas about where he may have gone.
If “Hamlet” is typically convenated to be a revenge story first and foremost, the extraordinary final sequence of zhao’s movie (which is much open to interpretation), Maps a Different Meaning onto “The Undiscovered Countal – Thi thi thi tht lies. Shakespeare’s intention, but nevertheless hears a resonant stir of echoes in the silence at the end of the show. Hamlet and the port may sound very different from our ears, but when the film’s opening card reminds us, they were interchangeable names at that time.
When we see “Hamlet” for the first time with Agnes and her brother (Joe Alwyn) in the audience after months of not talking to Will, metamorphosize the game in front of our eyes in a vehicle for mutual communion between the sad parents. Wills anxiety takes brilliant and uncontrollable new form at the theater’s stage, while Agnes’s heart feeling is given the leadership that the so urgent needs by virtue of how she projects her own pain on the performance.
Just as Hamlet asks Horatio to live on and tell her story, “Hamlet” will appeal with the port to do the same. This tragedy may not be the fate that neither the playwright nor his wife ever wanted to imagine his only son, but his story was never theirs to tell, and it could not hope to mean as much to anyone else. Due to “Hamlet”, the little boy will die again a million times for centuries to come. But in that sleep sleep and what dreams can come, he will be reborn as often, his memory did forever over a more brilliant future than even William Shakespeare could have written for him.
Rating: A-
“The Harbor” premiered at 2025 Tellurid Film festival. Focus functions release it in theaters on Thursday, November 27.
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