Hamnet on Canal Plus: dazzling Jessie Buckley (review)

The British actress shines in this variation on the creation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet where Chloe Zhao returns to this sensory cinema which constitutes her DNA. A film as beautiful as it is powerful about grief.

Released in France at the start of the year, Hamnet is broadcast for the first time this Tuesday evening on Canal Plu (and visible in streaming on MyCanal). Première was won over by Chloe Zhao’s latest film, particularly for the remarkable performance of Jessie Buckley, awarded the Oscar for best actress last March. Our review:

Hamnet opens in majesty with a shot in the heart of nature where we discover, nestled at the foot of a tree, its heroine Agnès who, having lost her mother at a very young age, has since found comfort in this immensity, in the middle of the fauna and flora, and whose gift of predicting the future has earned her to be considered a witch. This suspended moment tells both this woman and what the next two hours will be like. The lead of a symphony which will give pride of place to the great and beautiful feelings that Chloe Zhao will embrace head-on without ever being afraid of them and thereby avoiding any slide towards whining pathos. And abandon the contemplative grace of his first works for a more direct and assertive lyricism.

Because this plan is also a signature. We are at the heart of a film by Chloe Zhao, the director discovered exactly ten years ago with The Songs My Brothers Taught Me. This sensory cinema that we also found in the multi-Oscar-winning Nomadland, her gateway to Hollywood, where she further forged this link between femininity and nature. And after the Marvel parenthesis with The Eternals, she accepted a proposal which put her right back into what constitutes her DNA. The adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel and this variation around the creation of Hamlet that the author imagined inspired by the death of her son Hamnet