SYNOPSIS (IMdb)
In late 16th-century England, Agnes, a healer sensitive to the world around her, builds a home with William, a local tutor and aspiring playwright. As their lives fracture, they are tested by distance, silence, and grief.
REVIEW
Yesterday alone there has been two releases of the upcoming superheroes trailer - Supergirl and He-Man. Watching them one after another made me realised something that has been buried inside for so long - the look of mainstream film that has been coming out of the same template and assembly line - urrghhh.
Watching Hamnet on a big screen provides me solace out of the surrounding noise that is the social media, where the words spoken and the images projected are becoming borderline pornographic. The knowledge of reality has been totally shaped of what we see and hear from that little device straight out of Phillip K. Dick's 1968 novel - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The device is called the Empathy Box, which is close to what we have now - the handphone. The endless play of deceiving montages poisoning the soul. That is why the masters of old presses on travelling and being physically at the place to experience the truth.
AGNES IS CHLOE
Anyways back to Hamnet. Chloé Zhao's screen interpretation of the Maggie O'Farrell's novel is not centered on William Shakespeare as his biopic but instead to the lady protagonist in a form of Agnes - his wife - who has very little history record. And as that famous saying goes - behind every successful man, there is a lady.
It reminds me straight of U-Wei's alternate perspective of event in Wangi Jadi Saksi. In Hamnet, I think Chloé uses Agnes as her alter ego/surrogate and the story taken from the novel in the 16th-century England is just a play of metaphor - just like how Frank Herbert metaphorise the real world conflict centered in who controls the oil - represented by the Spice Melange.
Probably Chloe suffers some sort of demonising and a witch hunt as a Chinese born in Beijing and making it to England at the age of 15 and her desire of doing arts and film - something that the general society mostly everywhere looks down upon - until you actually is a success story - and suddenly everyone knows you and come with all the confetties.
METAPHOR AND META-CINEMA
Metaphorised is also her pain is doing what she loves - like a child birth - and also its lost. Death. The phases an artist goes through. This is where Agnes husband's character - William Shakespeare comes into the picture, representing her Animus (the masculine in the female) in channelling her lost and sorrow in the shape of that historical stage play of Hamlet at the Globe Theater, and gives the Hamlet play a different story and interpretation altogether - similar to what Wangi said about the account of Hang Tuah final battle with Hang Jebat in Wangi Jadi Saksi.
The final scene is peak catharsis and empathy not only for the audience in the Globe Theater scene, but also the ones watching the film. When the scene projected is talking about the medium itself - meta-cinema. All life's a stage, indeed.
In the age of CG and AI generated megaslop, (like the Supergirl and He-Man trailer) the old-masters, painterly and poetry, one-light-sourced, frame treatment in Hamnet, stands out like a rose amongst the thorns. The Oscars still know their stuff thus the Best Actress for Agnes (Jessie Buckley performance is stellar! and also the kid acting as Hamnet) - Chloe's screen surrogate.
It is nice to see majority audience stayed till the end of the credit roll to see the names involved in making this film. And knowing the tickets paid is going towards their family and livelihood. I am personally not sure if Im willing to spend money to see a one-man AI prompted film on a big screen yet.
It is probably still a tragedy. But with the inclusion of meta-cinema, this might go nearer to comedy.