As You Like It is in many ways the quintessential Shakespearean romance with it's troubled society banishing young lovers who escape to the forest, play around with gender roles, and return married and happy and everything is better. It is the exploration of the idea that "love conquers everything" and "all you need is love." While some scholars debate whether it is one of the Bard's best or weaker works, it hasn't been explored in film as much as more popular marriage comedies (Much Ado About Nothing) and the few film versions are not regarded as great either. Kenneth Branagh's last Shakespeare film adaption (so far) is often dismissed as such too but for me it demands some reviewing as it might offer more than one expects.
Branagh plays with the story quite a bit by setting it in colonial Japan and including a multiracial cast who all do a great job with their roles. But while doing so he stays true to the story's heart, a determined insistence in the power of love to overcome the worst. I felt his placing the story in a colonial location, featuring people who perhaps shouldn't be where they are, with the banishment and the romantic transformations, was a fitting and fascinating setting for this story to play out.
As usual Branagh's penchant for beautiful art direction is abundantly obviously. Both his classic Japanese inspired sets and the forest of Arden itself, are gorgeous and seek to make the story feel lush, fleshing out the romances intertwined in the story. Branagh manages to both challenge certain assumptions, with his interracial casting, and in other ways plays it safe, by downplaying some of the gender role reversals, but the overall effect of the settings gives it the sort of transgressive quality this story needs to hit its notes.
Overall on rewatching As You Like It, I did like it. It was visually pleasing, comically entertaining, and charmingly romantic.
As You Like It
Starring: Bryce Dallas Howard, David Oyelowo, Romola Garai, Kevin Klien, Adrien Lester, Alfred Molina, Brian Blessed, Janet McTeer
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Writers: William Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh
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