"Much Ado About Nothing"
                          A Film Review
                               by
                      Linda Lopez McAlister

   Suddenly, after a dearth of films for adult women this summer,
this week there are at least three films playing in the Tampa Bay
area that make some claim to being reviewed under the rubric "Women
and Film." There's a film biography of Tina Turner, a new film
written and directed by Nora Ephron, and a film version of Jean
Rhys's novel "Wide Sargasso Sea."  I'll try to get to them all
eventually if I can.  Meanwhile, I want to talk about a film
that probably has less to do with women and film than those just
mentioned but one that you'll want to see because of its sheer
exuberance and glorious good feeling (most of the time).  I'm
referring to Kenneth Branagh's film version of Shakespeare's "Much
Ado About Nothing."  It opened last night, in its Florida
premiere, at the Tampa Theater and I recommend it highly.

    What I like most about this film is not what Shakespeare brings
to it but what Branagh does.  He has an absolutely wonderful gift for
conveying emotion through moving pictures that are almost
choreographic in feel and often need no words at all to make their
point.  One example is the wonderful opening sequence of "Much
Ado" underneath the credits.  People are sitting around after
lunch on the sunny slope of a Tuscan hillside listening to Beatrice
(Emma Thompson) read light-hearted poetry when word comes that Don
Pedro (Denzel Washington) and his men are returning from battle.  A
less imaginative filmmaker would then cut right to a scene welcoming
the arriving soldiers home.  Branagh, instead, gives us a long
and perfectly enchanting sequence showing first the young women
and then the returning soldiers racing exuberantly to their
respective bathing spots, tearing off their clothes, and scrubbing
down to look (and smell) their best in order to meet their friends.
You say to yourself, "Of course that's what they'd do," and you know
from this frantic rush to look and feel their best just how these
people feel about one another.  Another of my favorite examples of
Branagh's brilliant visual storytelling is the montage of
superimposed shots of Beatrice and Benedick after they have both
overheard conversations staged for their benefit to make them
believe that the other is secretly in love with them.  Benedick's
skipping and strutting through a fountain and Beatrice's soaring on
a swing leave no doubt how this news makes each of them feel,
though not a word is spoken.

   Not that the spoken word isn't also a source of joy here--it is
Shakespeare, after all, and one of the true joys in the
Shakespearian comedies is the repartee between Beatrice and
Benedick before their love for one another is revealed.  Along with
Kate and Portia and Cleopatra, Beatrice has surely got to be on any
feminist's list of favorite Shakespearian women for her sharp
tongue and biting wit.  Thompson's Beatrice is, I thought, a little
softer than some I've seen (I once saw Katherine Hepburn in this
role, for example), but she and Branagh as Benedick do make a good
pair of verbal sparring partners.

   One not so funny thing that this film brings home to a feminist,
however, is just how little authority a woman's voice had--even a
woman as articulate as Beatrice--at that time.  The dramatic crisis
of the plot comes about when Don John (Kenau Reeves) spreads a
false story that Hero (Kate Beckinsale) has had sex with another
man the night before she is to be married to Claudio (Robert Sean
Leonard), having staged such a scene in Hero's window where Don
Pedro and others could witness it.  Hero's protestations that she
is wrongly accused and Beatrice's testimony that she had slept in
the same room with Hero every night for a year and could vouch for
her virtue simply fall on deaf ears when the accusers are men.
Even Hero's own father believes the slander immediately rather than
listen to his daughter's words.  (It does turn out all right but
only because other men, even those as scraggly and stupid as
Dogberry's watchmen, are believed when they bring forth evidence
that clears Hero's name).

   That depressing realization aside, however, "Much Ado About Nothing"
is a beautiful film, perfect for a summer's night, that will make you
leave the theater ready to hop the next plane to Italy where it was
filmed in a beautiful villa in the hills near Chianti. Arrivedercci!

   For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women
and Film.