American Cinematographer - January 2005 - 122

PiiitsEast
Shakespeare Returns to Venice
by John Calhoun
The

new

film

adaptation of
Merchant of

Venice, which
stars Al Pacino
as

Shylock,
presents

Shakespeare's
play as a
thriller.

Venice has been a popularfilm loca¬
tion, though it has rarely been

dressed to revisit its Renaissance-

era glory days in movies. Thus, it's some¬
what strange to see the Rialto swarming
with actors in 16th-century garb during

the

opening sequence of William
Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.
"We could only work on the right side of
the bridge," recalls director of photogra¬
phy BenoTt Delhomme, AFC (Artemisia,
The Scent of Green Papaya, The Loss of
Sexual Innocence). "The left side was
we couldn't stop all of

for tourists. And
the

gondola and vaporetto traffic. It's like
shooting in New York - you can't block

the traffic."
You also can't prevent
from
118

January 2005

going down, which it's

the

sun

prone to

do

early during winter, when Merchant of
Venice was shooting. "At 4 o'clock, it
was pitch black," says Delhomme. "We
had to relight the whole set with big
helium balloons. A lot of this picture was
shot night-for-day because we never had
12 hours of daylight. All the close-ups of
Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons on the Rialto
were done at night."
In this first major film version of
Shakespeare's play, which was directed
by Michael Radford, Pacino plays
Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, and
Irons plays Antonio, the title character.
Antonio borrows money from Shylock to
help his young friend, Bassanio (Joseph
Fiennes), court the lovely Portia (Lynn
Collins), and when the loan cannot be
repaid, the demanded forfeit is a pound

of flesh. This notorious scenario, which
vacillates between comic and

tragic

elements, has always presented prob¬
lems of tone to

interpreters of The

Merchant of Venice, but Delhomme says
he and Radford resolved it by treating
the film

as a

thriller. This also

filmmakers avoid

helped the
staginess of presenta¬

tion. "We wanted to shoot it in

a

modern

impress people with a
painterly style," says the cinematogra¬
pher. "Of course, when you work on a
film about Venice, you can study a lot of
painters - Caravaggio, Tiziano,
way, not try to

Veronese

- but we wanted to
go more
with the energy of the actors. We don't
have many landscapes in the film, partly

because
are our

we

didn't have time; the faces

landscapes."

bTCSDRDelaecpohlsiochromauimcuynrftntrfe.ty.s,y

bBSVetrpoeanhivouycnf,
Merchant



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