THIS COUNTRY WHICH I CALL JAPAN:” KENNETH BRANAGH’S FILM ADAPTATION OF AS YOU LIKE IT

Abstract

Olga Katafiasz analyses As You Like It (2006), the fifth adaptation of Shakespeare by Kenneth Branagh, which is set in Japan – or a place resembling it. Branagh’s Japan is viewed as a strange simulacrum, a reference specific and distant at the same time. From the very beginning of the film Branagh builds the impression that he is creating the reality or an illusion of reality. That is why Roland Barthes’s famous essay L’empire des signes (Empire of Signs) is crucial to the author’s interpretation. The key character is Jaques (Kevin Kline): he plays an extremely important part in Shakespeare’s comedy, and in Branagh’s film he seems to be the director’s alter ego. Jaques is melancholy, but his melancholy is not regarded as an illness, but more as a defense strategy against the world. The director’s world (strange, foreign Japan and unreal Ardennes Forest) is dominated by Melancholy experience, and its inhabitants have abandoned their dreams of Utopia. The country which Branagh named Japan is in fact a world of loss.