Review of "Hamlet Liikemaailmassa" (Hamlet Goes Business)

A Finnish noir comedy version of Hamlet, set in a family-owned corporate group. If you can imagine that you can pretty much imagine the film. As with other Kaurismaki films the time period of the setting feels a bit indeterminate - there are some computers on desks, but otherwise it looks 1950s (the clothes, the interiors) or even earlier. The screenplay credit goes to William Shakespeare, though I rather feel that there are some departures from the text and from the story-line as I remember it. Certainly the Hamlet character doesn't seem to be as tortured and indecisive as the one that I think Shakespeare imagined.

I watched this once before, at the Sydney Film Festival in 1991 - Ruth was pregnant with Louis, iron-deficient and so eating bunches of parsley as a cinema snack. I joined in to keep her company, so I associate this and other films that I saw there with the taste and feel of parsley. I didn't remember much about it, apart from some of the interior shots; curiously I remembered it as being in washed out colour, but it's black and white.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, from a real DVD.