Love's Labour's Lost. - Review - movie review

Interview, June, 2000 by Graham Fuller

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Branagh's riskiest Shakespeare adaptation yet is a musical set in 1930s "Oxbridge," where the student king and his fellow abstainers from women fail to resist the charms of the visiting French princess (Alicia Silverstone) and her ladies-in-waiting. The Gershwin, Porter, Kern, and Berlin songs that--along with breezy mock newsreel footage--replace two-thirds of Shakespeare's text are delightfully rendered, but the dancing is ropey, the comedy sequences occasionally risible, and the compositions are full of gaping holes. It's hard, though, to dislike a movie so patently borne along by a good-natured desire to entertain.