‘Measure for Measure’: Film Review

Take away the title and a few characters’ names, and you’d have to be pretty well versed in the Bard to recognize Paul Ireland’s Melbourne-set Measure for Measure as a modern interpretation of that play. Central relationships and plots are so changed — a man’s sister is turned into his girlfriend, for one thing — that it would be safer to say the film was “suggested by” its predecessor, with more than a dash of Romeo and Juliet thrown in, and give it a different name.

But the literary source is one of only a couple of real draws in what is otherwise a fairly routine present-day crime saga, in which a forbidden romance ignites tensions between native Australian crimelords and a Muslim immigrant’s gang. The other draw is Hugo Weaving, whose interpretation of the play’s Duke represents by far the most believable human being onscreen. If only the young lovers were as well developed in Ireland and the late Damian Hill’s script, the drama might rise to the level of the real-world tensions it invokes.

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Those lovers are Claudio (Harrison Gilbertson), an aspiring music producer, and Jaiwara (Megan Smart), whose family fled a war zone years ago. The two live in a huge, working-class housing complex on the far fringe of the city, the domain of Duke and his less genteel criminal underlings. Mark Leonard Winter’s Angelo is chief among these. He’s hustling meth to residents of the flats, and as in previous godfathery dramas, his boss disapproves. Better to stick to polite loan-sharking, says Duke, and sell some harmless grass at most.

When one of Angelo’s messed-up customers goes on a racist shooting spree in the courtyard, strangers Claudio and Jaiwara are thrown together by the violence. Unsettled, they spend the day together walking around the city — starting what is, by movie standards, a pretty spark-free romance. It’s a star-crossed one as well: “In my world, we are forbidden,” the Muslim woman tells the outsider. What she doesn’t tell him is that the person who’ll object most strenuously to their love, her fundamentalist brother, is the well known gang-leader Farouk (Fayssal Bazzi). When he learns of the relationship, Farouk conspires to get Claudio thrown in jail on bogus charges.

Meanwhile, police attention generated by that shooting spree has forced Duke to go on the lam, handing control of things to Angelo and making him promise to stop selling drugs. Far from certain his instructions will be obeyed, he proceeds to spy on Angelo: In the play, the Duke disguises himself as a friar and continues to walk the streets; here, he sets up surveillance cameras everywhere and holes up in a nearby luxury suite.

Duke isn’t pleased with what he sees — not with the continuing (escalating, in fact) drug trade, and not with the exploitative way Angelo gets involved in Claudio and Jaiwara’s plight — but is slow to act. The movie’s most successful embodiment of the play’s themes is Duke’s hesitation, which Weaving plays with paternal concern. Can the power-drunk, drug-addled Angelo grow up? How far can he go before Duke allows his enemies to punish him?

Ireland’s answer to these questions leans hard enough in the direction of gangster melodrama that the film’s competing elements (culture-clash social realism, tricky plot devices familiar from Shakespeare’s comedies) are mostly drowned out. Shakespeare scholars have often labeled Measure for Measure a “problem play,” a term that has been given multiple meanings; Ireland’s tonally ambivalent film fits one of those meanings pretty well.

Production company: Toothless Pictures
Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films (Available Friday, September 4, on VOD/digital)
Cast: Hugo Weaving, Harrison Gilbertson, Megan Smart, Mark Leonard Winter, Doris Younane, Fayssal Bazzi, Daniel Henshall
Director: Paul Ireland
Screenwriters: Damian Hill, Paul Ireland
Producers: Damian Hill, Paul Ireland
Director of photography: Ian Jones
Production designer: Vanessa Franz
Costume designer: Zohie Castellano
Editor: Gary Woodyard
Composers: Tristan Dewey, Tai Jordan
Casting director: Thea McLeod
107 minutes