[In the following review, Duguid considers Kenneth Branagh's 2000 film adaptation of Love's Labour's Lost.]

Love's Labour's Lost has an odd stage history; hardly ever performed between 1609 and 1939, it came strongly back into fashion in the 1970s, when it was put on in a variety of settings and costumes. The play's incomplete state attracts some sort of updating, and Kenneth Branagh's idea of setting it in the late 1930s seems to offer the advantages of stylish and recognizable costumes and an atmosphere of vanished gaiety.

Having had the idea, Branagh runs away with it, introducing outmoded cinematic devices, such as Pathe-style coverage of events at the Court of Navarre, Ealing comedy chases and interpolated song-and-dance routines. The film is made up of many such allusions; Dull is a comic policeman, Costard a vaudeville trouper with a suitcase and a pocketful of flags; Holofernes becomes Holofernia, a St Trinian's schoolmistress in a tweed suit with mortar board and gown; Moth is an army batman; the King, Berowne, Longueville and Dumaine are clean-cut guys, amiable hoofers attending an Ivy League college, and the Princess and her ladies giggling vamps in evening gowns, smoking cigarettes in ivory holders. There are fantasy sequences involving aeroplanes, a Busby Berkeley routine in a swimming pool, and crane shots; from time to time, the characters break into song, and launch into an awkward dance routine, part tap, part chorus line, with low kicks and shuffles and tricks with chairs. The Masque of the Muscovites becomes an erotic apache dance with the men in vests and the women in fishnets and high heels; the Pageant of the Nine Worthies cuts immediately to a reverent walk-down version of “There's No Business Like Show Business”. From this, after Marcade's anouncement of the death of the King of France, the movie turns into Casablanca or Brief Encounter, with gleaming cars parked on aiport runways and the lovers embracing to the strains of “They Can't Take That Away From Me”; next, we have a short black-and-white war movie—bombed-out churches, civilians rounded up—and a Victory parade in which all are reunited, a sentimental replacement of the play's open-endedness.

The film's imitation of pulp cinema's jerky movements and placing shots are echoed in the acting style—a display of bumps and grinds, winks and nods, pratfalls and double-takes. The women are shot in glaring Hollywood close-up to give the full effect of mascara, lipstick and teeth; the men, who get most of the action, express their feelings in rather poorly rendered versions of “Dancing Cheek to Cheek” and “I Get a Kick Out of You”, as they dance with photographs of their beloveds, or slide down bannisters, or flinch in elaborate disgust when accidentally they embrace. The carefully detonated effects of the misdirected letters are muffled in a flurry of sight gags; the handing round of glasses of champagne and the lighting of cigarettes distract us from the Princess's prohibition in the final scene. Possibly, Branagh means to re-create a cheery amateurishness of technique as well as atmosphere; but, in fact, lack of atmosphere is the film's most serious shortcoming. The plot is very clear, thanks to the Movie-tone intrusions and the extravagant cutting of the text, though none of the main actors do anything with the remaining verse and seem anxious to get through the “taffeta phrases” as quickly as possible (it is a sign of Branagh's directorial grip that all the cast imitate his slightly breathy delivery). The play's formal melancholy has quite along with the Songs of Ver and Hiem, as has its nature imagery, replaced by a college quadrangle, a library and what looks like a pretentious riverside restaurant. It is hard to know for whom all this expensive foolery is intended—someone who has never seen the play, or any play, perhaps; or someone who has never seen a movie.