Considered more anti-adaptation than an adaptation of Shakespeare's work, Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear was a controversial film to say the least: you either reject it or find it fascinating. Many critics were frustrated or even irritated, the film was called "incoherent" and "impenetrable" and some considered it pretentious without justification. Over time, however, the film gained the status of a "cult work" and now is studied in the context of film studies and film theory.
Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear is more a free reinterpretation, an experimental work, which communicates at the level of ideas and themes with Shakespeare's work, but abandons the linear story. Shakespeare is "re-discovered" by characters who try to reconstruct the lost literature. There even appears a character called "Shakespeare Jr." who tries to reconstruct the work.
Set in a post-apocalyptic future (shortly after the Chernobyl explosion, when people were trying to get back on their feet), the film lacks narrative coherence. While Shakespeare shows the collapse of a world, Godard shows what remains after the world (and culture) has already collapsed. If in the play Lear goes mad as loses his power, in Godard's film the whole world seems “mad” or meaningless. Basically, Godard did not want to adapt King Lear, but to show what it means to NO longer be able to adapt Shakespeare in a fragmented world.
USA, Bahamas, France, Switzerland, 1987
