Tessa Thompson (Westworld) gives a career-endingly bad performance in the title role of this risible adaptation of Ibsen. It was so bad I gasped after her first sentence, committed myself to seeing if it settled down, but simply left after thirty minutes of aural torture. I am not sure what she was going for. Maybe Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret in The Crown? It is so affected and so arch I can only assume it was an actual choice but Christ alive why did none of the British cast members say anything?
What else can I say about my brief interaction with this film? I am not entirely sure why it was updated from Ibsen’s original period and setting to 1950s Britain, as opposed to, say, a contemporary setting. It allows for some lovely frocks. But maybe writer-director Nia DaCosta (THE MARVELS) was on the verge of saying something interesting about the sexual and cultural mores of the time? Who can tell. She certainly did NOT seem to be interested in interrogating the presence of a rich, nepo-baby black woman in white society in the 30 minutes I watched. And I suspect, given the flashy superficial mise-en-scene, that recasting Hedda’s former lover as a woman (Nina Hoss - apparently scene-stealingly brilliant) was more stunt than nuanced take on queer love in the fifties. As soon as they started dancing to a version of Bjork’s It’s Oh So Quiet I made my move. This is not the film for me. I am afraid I just could not get passed the horrific fake accent.
HEDDA is rated R and has a running time of 107 minutes. It played Toronto and London and will be streaming on Amazon Prime on October 29th.
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