Thursday, July 14, 2011

King Lear and The Tempest in The Last Lear

The Last Lear. Dir. Rituparno Ghosh. Perf. Amitabh Bachchan, Preity Zinta, and Arjun Rampal. 2007. DVD. V One, 2008.

And the last Lear post in this brief Lear sequence is The Last Lear. The film is Indian, and it centers on the relationship between an aging actor and an aspiring director.

In the scene below, the director tries to convince the actor to play a role in his latest film:


Beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, and deeply delivered, The Last Lear is a high point of Indian engagement with Shakespeare.

Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest