Shaun de Waal Movie of the week
The huge importance of teenagers to the American and thus global film industry has meant more and more movies being made specifically for them. Titanic would not have been the hit it was had it not appealed to a teen audience: the girls went (repeatedly) to see Leonardo DiCaprio and the boys went to watch the ship sink.
A new development is the teen movie drawn from an old classic. The delightful Clueless was based on Jane Austen’s Emma, and, more recently, Cruel Intentions drew on that very adult 18th-century tale of sexual manipulation, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Now we have 10 Things I Hate About You, taken from William Shakespeare’s comedy of antagonistic lovers, The Taming of the Shrew.
The sudden regard for Shakespeare is, of course, a result of the triumph of Shakespeare in Love, but before that there was Baz Luhrmann’s ultra-modern-dress version of Romeo and Juliet, with DiCaprio and Clare Danes as the young lovers – young enough to be at school, if not perhaps as young as Shakespeare’s pubescent originals.
The pretty, precocious kids in 10 Things I Hate About You are, indeed, at school. Padua High School, to be precise. Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has just transferred there; soon he is having pointed out to him its more interesting denizens, including the Stratford sisters, Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) and Kat (Julia Stiles, reminding one of a young Faye Dunaway).
Kat is the rebellious intellectual (a “heinous bitch” to her contemporaries), Bianca the flighty airhead dying to be seduced by a rich jock (Andrew Keegan). Except she’s not allowed to date until Kat does, and Kat is entirely contemptuous of the whole business.
So Cameron, who wants to go out with Bianca, has to concoct a plan to get Kat on a date. This plan involves another quasi- outsider, Patrick Verona (the interestingly named Heath Ledger), in the position of Shakespeare’s Petruchio.
The Shakespearean influence would be more obvious if the subsequent attachments, subterfuges, misunderstandings and manoeuvrings weren’t already so much a part of the cinema’s lexicon of romantic devices. But this is not just a matter of script by Shakespeare with additional dialogue by Karen McCullah Lutz. The clash of Renaissance and 20th-century speech is often delightful – mere seconds separates “I burn, I pine, I perish” from “Put her in your spank bank.” The movie plays with its source effectively, adapting and updating without dumbing down.
10 Things I Hate About You moves swiftly, wittily and stylishly to its satisfying climax at that sentimentalised American institution, the prom. Supporting roles (that is, the grown-ups) such as Daryl Mitchell as a Shakespeare-loving teacher and Larry Miller as the girls’ father, add to an entertaining whole.
One wonders, though, about the inevitable result of Hollywood’s rush to supply product for a teen audience. Now we have movie characters in an ambiguous space between childhood and adulthood, still apparently glowing with innocence (even the nastier ones), yet already entwined in mating rituals – though in this film any actual sex is studiously avoided. This despite the fact that sex is clearly what drives it all. Are these kids too young to have sex? Does the thought of children having sex bother parents in the audience?
One may not go as far as Camille Paglia, who would talk of the return of the repressed (childhood sexuality), but it’s not hard to see in this movie a hint of American puritanism under pressure from American capitalism. For the rest, it’s enough to make anyone over the age of 25 feel old.
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