Foul play

>> The Triumph of Love goes off the rails

by MARK SLUTSKY

Adapting a play to the screen can be tricky business—and adapting a 200-year-old play, as director Clare Peploe does in The Triumph of Love, is even tougher. There’s the matter of making the material cinematic and not stagey as well as the problem of translating a text written (by 18th century French author Pierre Marivaux) for a style of acting much broader than what contemporary audiences are used to.
The Triumph of Love stars Mira Sorvino as the princess of a kingdom usurped unfairly by her late father; strolling in the woods one day she chances upon the naked Agis (Jay Rodan), true heir to the throne. Rodan’s been hidden away in a country estate by the philosopher Hermocrates (Ben Kingsley), who plans to help restore the kid to his legacy. Sorvino is smitten, and sees a chance to both hook up with Rodan and right her father’s wrongs.

Her first challenge is to meet the dude without revealing her identity. To that end, she dresses as a man and starts wooing everyone in sight. First Kingsley’s sister, played by Fiona Shaw; then Kingsley himself, after revealing herself as a woman (though not which woman), then Rodan, in a friendly way, before she can reveal herself. It’s a gender-bending bonanza.

There are some problems here. First is the play itself, which isn’t really that fascinating—I mean, the premise is kind of fun in a frothy way, but the movie mostly consists of Sorvino wandering around and chatting with different characters. To spice it up, or something, Peploe takes a bold, totally wrong stylistic approach, shooting it all with a hand-held camera and piecing the movie together in a lot of jump-cuts in a very self-consciously modern fashion. And it’s not even executed all that well.

While she gets credit for taking a chance, the style of the movie totally contradicts the material and the acting style, and keeps directing your attention back to the camerawork. After two hours this gets very tiresome; you really stop caring who’s in love with who and who’s supposed to be who. Sorvino and Kingsley are charming nonetheless, and they might’ve made this passable if the director had just stayed out of the way. :

The Triumph of Love opens Friday, May 3