Each year, the San Francisco International Film Festival chooses a director to honor with the Founder’s Directing Award, and this year’s was bestowed upon the great actor-director Kenneth Branagh. With past winners like Clint Eastwood, Akira Kurosawa, Werner Herzog and Mike Leigh, Branagh finds himself in good company. He came to San Francisco this week to accept the award and to participate in a special on-stage event at the Castro Theatre on Friday with a screening of his second film, “Dead Again.”
Kenneth Branagh has often been called the next Laurence Olivier, in praise of his fantastic film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, both as a director and an actor. At 28, he made his directorial debut with “Henry V,” in which he also played the title role, earning Academy Award nominations for both Best Actor and Best Director. In his interview on Friday, he revealed that he was actually in San Francisco when “Henry V” was beginning to get significant critical acclaim, and he cited reading a glowing New York Times review of it while in San Francisco as a life-changing moment. His later film, “Much Ado About Nothing,” is a masterpiece and the definitive version of the play; Branagh plays Benedick to Emma Thompson’s Beatrice, alongside an impressive supporting cast including Denzel Washington and Kate Beckinsale.
Although his adaptations of the Bard’s “Love’s Labour Lost” as a Hollywood musical and “As You Like It” were both flops, as Branagh puts it, only the great can fail spectacularly.
The evening opened with an interview with Branagh by CalShakes Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone. When the floor opened up for audience questions, there was a general, well-deserved outpouring of gratitude for Branagh’s work in making Shakespeare accessible to the masses, and yet he still remained sincerely humble. We were reminded of his beginnings as a boy from a working-class family in Northern Ireland, who moved to England at age nine and adopted an English accent as a means to ensure he was understood and fend off bullies.
As a young actor and director, he was known to mouth off a fair bit about “wankers” who claimed to know what Shakespeare was or how Shakespeare should be performed. He has had the misfortune of having some of these youthful phrases, now circulating on the Internet, quoted back to him, like “I’m just a foul-mouthed Brit.”
After the interview and a brief intermission, the audience was treated to a screening of “Dead Again,” in which Branagh also stars alongside Emma Thompson. “Dead Again” is an impressively crafted film, which embraces, acknowledges and mocks all the conventions of film noir and puts them in a modern setting. When Mike Church (Branagh) is called into the orphanage where he grew up to help Grace, a woman who has lost her memory (Thompson), everything starts to get screwy for him. Through a series of hilarious events, they wind up visiting a quirky hypnotist who helps Grace regain some memories. Her memories are not from the recent past, but rather involve a married couple from the 1940s that look exactly like our heroes but are, in fact, Margaret and Roman Strauss, famous for the fact that Roman was sentenced to death for Margaret’s murder.
Of course, it’s absurd, and we have to suspend our disbelief just as much as our heroes do. Here the film gets very, very clever. Branagh thickly applies the noir from the suspicious camera angles to the genre-like dialogue, and Mike’s own disbelief about his peculiar circumstances grows. But in this suspension, Branagh also manages to capture resounding comedy, both from one-liners and the intended irony of the situations. Branagh succeeds in building up so much suspense, so much dramatic tension and so much enthralling action, with earned plot twist after plot twist, that by the end, you actually have to catch your breath. Here Branagh proves that he’s not just a master at putting theatre on film but at filmmaking itself, mastering film noir just as deftly as he did Shakespeare.
It has now been a few years since Branagh last brought a Shakespeare play to the big screen. When asked if he will be returning to Shakespeare again anytime soon, Branagh said he has plans to make a film of a play whose name cannot be uttered in the current venue: “The Scottish Play,” that is. And after a few more comments about superstition, he asked us if he had made himself absolutely clear yet. The unnamed play is, of course, “Macbeth.” He also stated that he would like to make another noir film set in San Francisco, a city so rich with film noir history.