PIRATES & PENANCE

 

Malinin and Sandokan: Profiles in Courage

 

What do triple toe-loops on the ice and pirates in tropical Southeast Asia have in common? Well, not much, except they were both at the top of my TV watchlist during last week's frigid winter storms.

 

After a long day at the keyboard, I like to chill in front of the tube at night, with a purring cat and a glass of wine, and having opted out of the news cycle to preserve what's left of my mental health, I found myself drawn into the figure skating competition at the Winter Olympics. At the same time, I happened upon Sandokan: The Pirate Prince, an 8-episode, Italian swashbuckler now streaming on Netflix.

 

For a week, I was madly channel-hopping between the two (although there are a thousand ways you can catch up with any Olympic events you might have missed), so that the two programs became almost inextricably linked in my brain. Both offer equal opportunities to cheer triumphs, commiserate with losses, cheer on underdogs, and explore complicated personalities. And both came loaded with plenty of drama.

 

Sandokan caught my eye, because, you know, pirates, even though I'd never heard of anybody in the cast, or the source material it's based on, a series of Victorian-era adventure novels by Emilio Salgari about a Malaysian pirate battling the English during the Age of Empire. And after a fairly ripping first episode, it almost lost me as it threatened to devolve into typical romantic fodder about a hunky pirate captain and his hostage, a snippy, entitled young beauty flinging insults and vitriol about to maintain her moral superiority — in short, all the tropes I wanted to subvert when I wrote my pirate novel, The Witch From the Sea, about a woman who becomes a working member of a pirate crew for the freedom of the open seas.

 

But the heroine, Marianne, soon drops her attitude, and gets drawn into the larger story of colonialism, attempted genocide, rebellion, and liberation. (Indeed, while there's a decent amount of shipboard action, these pirates are less interested in plunder than in battling English invaders who would steal their resources and enslave their people.) There's also the evolving mystery of pirate Sandokan's true origin, and heroic destiny. Along the way, we meet salty pirates, exotic natives, spirited women, and a plethora of sinister antagonists, including the corrupt English consul (Marianne's father), and an opium-smoking British naval captain out to hunt pirates, and the ruthless, sybaritic local sultan, with a taste for torture, both of whom have designs on Marianne.

 

Sexy Sandokan is played by Turkish-Albanian actor Can (pronounced "Gian") Yaman, a formidable presence with a searing gaze, who can twirl a scimitar like a cheerleader's baton. It took a while to warm up to Alanah Bloor as heroine Marianne, but she becomes more interesting as the story gains traction. I especially liked the dance-as-foreplay motif in which their romance evolves over a couple of elaborate set pieces, a formal ball at the consulate, and later, a Lunar New Year celebration in Singapore.

 

Meanwhile, over at the Olympics, most of the drama for Team USA centered on skaters who didn't quite live up to expectations. Champion ice dancing pair Madison Chock and Evan Bates "only" won silver, and there was some whining about a French judge whose scores might have elevated French pair Laurence Fournier and Guillaume Cizeron to the top spot. Yes, the Americans skated beautifully, but so did the French; I loved the precision of their Rhythmic category performance to Madonna's "Vogue."

 

But the story of the event — possibly of this entire Olympics — was 21-year-old figure skater Ilia Malinin, from Fairfax, Virginia. The son of two Russian figure skaters, Malinin, nicknamed the Quad God, is a star on the tournament circuit; he's like the Simone Biles of figure skating, doing amazing things on ice never before attempted, let alone achieved, by any other human, like the insanely difficult quadruple axel, and back flips. 

 

He and his Team USA cohorts had already won gold as a team. But, heavily favored to take gold in the individual event, he stunned the world with a poor performance, falling down twice in his final routine. The crowd cheered him on, anyway, but as he came off the ice, completely out of medal competition, and composed, but obviously disheartened, his father and coach exchanged a few words with him, but did not hug him. There wasn't a person in America, probably the world, that didn't want to give that kid a hug right that minute, except his dad. Fortunately, his other trainer stepped up and enveloped him in a massive embrace. A few minutes later, when the expected second-place winner, Mikhail Shaidorov,  from Kazakhstan, realized he'd been elevated to gold, Malinin trotted over to give him a congratulatory hug. Shaidorov was overwhelmed, and they held on to each other for a few minutes, the only two people in the entire arena who understood what the other was going through.

 

But having lost the gold in penance, Malinin found redemption. The hottest ticket at the Winter Olympics is always the Exhibition Gala on the last night, where skaters present routines out of competition, with no mandatory elements, and do whatever they want. Malinin skated to the song, "Fear," by a rapper called NF; dressed in jeans and a dark gray hoodie, he confronted darkness, disillusion, and crippling self-doubt, landed every masterful jump and flip (on a single blade, fer cryin' out loud), and emerged triumphant.

 

 

And here's the thing: no one will ever remember the disappointing free skate that landed him in 8th place instead of on the podium in the men’s individual competition. But no one will ever forget his exhibition program — it may become the defining image of this year’s games.

WILL POWER

Life initiates Art in graceful, passionate Shakespearean rhapsody, Hamnet

 

The words of William Shakespeare speak so directly to the heart, and to one's lived experience, that no context is needed. You don't require supplemental notes or background material to get swept up in the reckless joy of young love in Romeo and Juliet, the naked ambition of Macbeth, or the fatal hubris of King Lear.

 

So, the idea of creating a semi-fictional backstory on the events of Shakespeare's life leading up to and including the writing of his masterpiece, Hamlet, may seem superfluous, at the very least, if not downright foolhardy. Nonetheless, such was the conceit of Maggie O'Farrell's recent bestselling novel, Hamnet, now brought to the screen with extraordinary passion, delicacy, and restraint by filmmaker Chloe Zhao.

 

The story begins with the meeting of Will (Paul Mescal), educated son of a country glovemaker, hired to tutor a neighbor's sons in Latin, and Agnes (pronounced An-yis) (Jessie Buckley), from another country family nearby, who is rumored to be the daughter of a forest witch. Will is driven to write from the vastness of his soaring imagination. Agnes is a child of nature, an expert at herbal lore and remedies, who keeps a pet hawk. Their handfast marriage produces three children, and evolves to accommodate Will's frequent trips away to London, where his playwriting leads him.  

 

Their only son, Hamnet (an impish and tender Jacobi Jupe), is known to have died unexpectedly at age 11, the seminal incident through which Zhao and O'Farrell (who adapted the screenplay together) imagine the psychological forces that fueled the writing of the play. Most of us don't need any more reasons to admire Shakespeare's words, but the snippets from Hamlet that waft through the film, in rehearsals, or, ultimately, onstage at the Globe, filtered through the lens of the playwright's overwhelming grief and guilt at not being there during the crisis, are delivered with such heartbreaking fervor and immediacy, and feel so starkly expressive, it's like hearing them for the first time.

 

Mescal is particularly effective as Will directs the actor playing the part of Hamlet onstage, or takes the part of the ghost of Hamlet's father himself, bidding his son his final, heartfelt adieus. Also pretty great is Noah Jupe, as the young actor playing Hamlet onstage. Especially in the play (and the film)'s transcendent final moments, when Agnes is there to share in the redemptive power of what Will has created. (For an extra layer of resonance, Noah and Jacobi Jupe are brothers in real life.)

 

(The only scene that doesn't quite work in this regard is when Will, at a moment of profound despair, peers over the edge of a dock above the Thames and murmurs the first few lines of "To be or not to be . . . "  Is he just reciting these lines from the play because it's just such an atmospheric setting? Or is he supposed to be making up this brilliant speech on the spot, intact, without a single misplaced word?)

 

Will is the one with the gift for verbalizing his feelings, at least on paper, and onstage. But it's Agnes whose visceral experience of the story's deep emotions carries the movie, and Buckley's performance is absolutely fearless. The childbirth scenes are harrowing and compelling, the first when she goes alone into the forest to give birth within the giant, gnarled roots of an ancient tree, and the second, in a room with a midwife and a stool, when she delivers infant Hamnet and his stillborn twin, Judith, whom Agnes coaxes and bullies back to life through sheer force of will. Soft-spoken, a little saucy, and uncompromising, she is the movie's beating heart.

 

 

Zhao, also listed as co-producer and co-editor, must get most of the credit for the movie's look, tone, and sensibility. Some twilit interiors are so dim, you can barely see what's going on, as are exteriors in dank, perpetually hazy London. (Don't try watching this on a home screen, kids, it needs space!) But the scenes in Agnes' beloved forest are always vibrant and alive.

 

In particular, that gigantic tree on which Zhao's camera so lovingly feasts in the movie's opening moments, comes to represent the entirety of nature in all its scarred and towering nobility.