I’ve been a Ken­neth Branagh fan ever since see­ing the joy­ous tri­fle Much Ado About Noth­ing on a date with my first girl­friend in high school. Prob­a­bly to my date’s dis­may, it was also the moment I fell pas­sion­ately in love with Emma Thomp­son. Later, I enjoyed his down and dirty Henry V, the Hitch­cock­ian noir Dead Again, the over-the-top-and-beyond bom­bast of Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein, and even met another future girl­friend at Ham­let. But As You Like It is decid­edly lack­ing in Branagh’s proven flair for trans­lat­ing the­atre to the medium of cin­ema. In the US at least, it was orig­i­nally intended for the­atri­cal release through Pic­ture­house, but went straight to HBO.

Hav­ing never read the play nor seen it per­formed, I’ll cop to hav­ing done a lit­tle cram­ming on Wikipedia, the 21^st Cen­tury answer to Cliff’s Notes. Branagh has relo­cated the action from a duchy in France to an enclave of expa­tri­ate Euro­peans in 19^th cen­tury Japan, but to what advan­tage? There is lit­tle sense of a Euro­pean com­mu­nity abroad in an alien land; in fact very few Asian actors appear at all, even in the back­ground. A silently-staged ninja attack is a promis­ing open­ing, but ulti­mately dis­ap­point­ing to art­house audi­ences with high­brow wire-fu expec­ta­tions raised after Ang Lee’s Crouch­ing Tiger, Hid­den Dragon.

Ros­alind & Celia’s pretty frocks

Obvi­ously a low-budget film, As You Like It suf­fers in ways that similarly-priced movies made virtue. Stan­ley Tucci’s The Impos­tors, for exam­ple, made the cheap sets part of the fun, and beat Branagh by a few years to the device of an epi­logue fea­tur­ing an ensem­ble cast break­ing the fourth wall by lit­er­ally walk­ing off-set and behind the camera.

Clash of the diapers

Other mis­cel­la­neous disappointments:

• There’s an over-reliance on long, clumsy steady­cam takes, espe­cially one fum­bled shot in which Kevin Kline’s face is obscured through­out most of his deliv­ery of the play’s most famous mono­logue: “All the world’s a stage…”

• With a pri­vate Eng­lish gar­den stand­ing in for the forests of Japan, the over­cast weather mutes the color palette. The most vibrant col­ors are the occa­sional blos­som­ing tree and the pretty frocks worn by Ros­alind (Bryce Dal­las Howard) and Celia (Romola Garai).

• Brian Blessed (a reg­u­lar in Branagh’s com­pany) doesn’t do nearly enough of his trade­mark shout­ing. Per­haps he was afraid to rup­ture the del­i­cate Howard’s eardrums.

• The omnipresent score is really, really bad.

• And finally, As You Like It sports what must be the cheap­est fake lion in cin­ema his­tory; it was prob­a­bly pos­si­ble to stage some­thing more con­vinc­ing on the stage in Shakespeare’s day.

Offi­cial movie site: www.hbo.com/films/asyoulikeit

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to me.

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