Oscar winner Zhao shows the Bard’s life and sorrows in ‘Hamnet’

When Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao first studied Shakespeare at her British boarding school, the young Chinese pupil did not even speak English. So it has been a long journey to her latest film “Hamnet,” a poetic period drama that speculates on the life story of William Shakespeare himself, and is an early Academy Award frontrunner. “It was so hard,” she said , of her school days.

Zhao’s English teacher, Mr Robinson, would put classic texts in front of her and say, “Just stay after class every day. I’ll page-by-page help you,” she recalled. The hard work appears to have paid off. Premiering on Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival, Zhao’s “Hamnet” colours in the gaps of the little we know about William, his wife Agnes, their family and a tragedy that inspired arguably his greatest work. It is based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, which drew on evidence that the Shakespeares had a son called Hamnet — a name that scholars say would have sounded indistinguishable from “Hamlet” in Elizabethan-era England.

Novel and film speculate that Agnes encouraged William to move to London solo and pursue his dreams in the theatre, confident that their love was strong enough to endure the separation. But in a time when death and heartbreak lurked around every corner, particularly from childbirth and plague, the marriage grows emotionally as well as physically distant.

“Maggie’s novel, it was like a poem,” Zhao said.

“To see them fall in love and come together, be torn apart... it’s an inner civil war that we all battle with as we grow and mature.” Zhao’s interpretation takes a more chronological approach than the novel, and does not skimp on harrowing depictions of grief, leaving many in the Toronto audience in tears. It is the culmination of an astonishing journey for the director, from a self-described “weird exchange student” at England’s Brighton College to the top echelons of global cinema. Zhao earned early acclaim with US indie hits like “The Rider” before 2020’s “Nomadland,” a semi-fictional drama about the road-dwellers of the American West that won three Oscars including best picture and best director.

After an ill-fated blockbuster detour with Marvel superhero flop “Eternals,” “Hamnet” marks a decisive return to more intimate, high-brow filmmaking for Zhao. Zhao, 43, told the Toronto premiere audience she had spent her thirties making “horizon and sunset-chasing films” that were “very wide and expansive.”

Now “in my 40s, when I go through some difficult midlife crisis, I realized I was running away from myself, very similar to Will in the film,” she said. Still, it seems that Mr Robinson’s diligent tuition has continued to shape Zhao’s identity as a director.

Meanwhile, Ben Simon Channing Tatum says his performance in “Roofman,” which tells the true story of a man who robbed dozens of McDonald’s and hid out in a toy store, helped the stripper-turned-actor overcome “imposter syndrome.” “I was getting (acting) jobs before I knew anything of what I was doing,” Tatum told reporters on Sunday, a day after the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“Roofman” recounts the life of Jeffrey Manchester, who served in the US Army but struggled when he returned to civilian life in North Carolina, including financially.

He robbed dozens of fast food stores through the 1990s, mainly McDonald’s, entering the restaurants through the roof. The film highlights one of Manchester’s repeated gestures of kindness — ensuring restaurant staff were wearing coats before he locked them the cold storage. Manchester was arrested and sentenced to decades in prison, but broke out in 2004. The film centres on the months that followed the prison break, before his rearrest in 2005. Manchester built a secret hideout inside a Toys “R” Us store in the city of Charlotte, coming out after closure at night to wash in the bathroom, surviving largely on snack food like M&Ms.

Agence France-Presse