Berlinale 2025 review: 'Kein Tier. So Wild.' ('No Beast. So Fierce.') - Shakespeare + gang wars
Beyond the immediate satisfaction of a cheeky alliteration, his catchphrase referred to the fact that anyone who thinks they can adapt the Bard's works to suit their purposes with relative ease is kidding themselves. Especially when it comes to cinema.
All the world may be a stage, but it doesn't always have to be a film set - where Shakespeare has been a significant fixture since 1899's King John.
Adaptations have ranged from dutiful period versions to modern retellings in unexpected genres. We've had countless faithful restagings (the inescapable Laurence Olivier 'prestige' takes), musicals (West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate), samurai films (Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Ran), sci-fi adventures (Forbidden Planet), teen comedies (She's The Man, Jawbreaker), cute animated lions (The Lion King) and creative hybrids (Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet). And quality has been mixed, to say the very least. For every Much Ado About Nothing or 10 Things I Hate About You, there are a dozen like Deliver Us From Eva, Romeo Must Die and Cymbeline.
If you haven't heard of that last one, it's dirty cops versus biker gangs with Ethan Hawke and Ed Harris. Stay away.
All to say that reworking the famous English playwright is a trickier endeavour than many a foolhardy director would like to think.
Luckily, Burhan Qurbani is far from foolhardy and never one to shy away from a challenge.
'Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end'
After wowing audiences at the 70th Berlinale with his ambitious adaptation of Alfred Döblin's epic 1929 novel 'Berlin Alexanderplatz' – a modernist masterpiece and one of the most important works of the Weimer Republic – the Afghan-German director returns with a modern retelling of "Richard III".
Much like Berlin Alexanderplatz, in which he recontextualised the classic text by making the lead character an undocumented refugee from Guinea-Bissau, Qurbani's Shakespeare iteration transposes the story to the modern-day Germany and gender-flips the central protagonists.
No Beast. So Fierce. starts as a bloody gang war between the two noble Arab families of York and Lancaster is brought to an end by the youngest York daughter Rashida (Kenda Hmeidan), a lawyer whose unconventional courtroom tactics brings peace at last.
However, she realises that as a woman, she'll always be a pawn in a man's world. Her eldest brother Imad (Mehdi Nebbou) immediately takes control, condemning her to obedience. Worse, he and matriarch Qamar (Meriam Abbas) want to celebrate peace with the cries of a newborn and plot to have Rashida tied to a marital bed.
Rashida scoffs at this plan. She doesn't intend to obey but to summon a storm that will lead to her freedom and supremacy. In order to do so, she'll have to scheme, seduce and order hits via her trusty enforcer Mishal (Hiam Abbass, brilliantly playing a merciless angel of death who threatens to grows a conscience).
Whatever it takes to no longer be a sister and a daughter to those who rule Berlin's underworld but to be its undisputed queen.
'My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale'
'You know the blurb – I've just rewritten it a little,' says Rashida to her disapproving mother. There's a director's statement if ever there was one.
Qurbani and his co-screenwriter Enis Maci have deftly merged classic and modern German dialogue with Arabic culture, language and contemporary echoes. Not content to do what Baz Luhrmann did with 'Romeo and Juliet', the director takes things further by opening avenues for meaning without ever force-feeding any clumsy commentary that would shackle the film to overtly socio-political interpretations. He never overplays his hand and trusts his audience to understand that the gender-swap can lead to meditation on cultural and contemporary attitudes towards immigration and women, and how the repeated 'freedom' Rashida exclaims prior to her first monologue has layers.
Who can be free in a patriarchy? Who can be free when freedom is promised by a country plagued by societal double-standards and a troubled relationship to the concept of 'home'? Who can ever be free from their past?
The excellent script is matched by a sense of style that gives this gangster thriller a dark and evocative visual oppressiveness. And just when you think you've settled into that grey world, an arresting third act twist in staging elevates this adaption to a new level. Cinematographer Yoshi Heimrath and production designer Jagna Dobesz rise to the challenge and bolster this bold shift from realism to something more experimental, abstract and symbolic. The stage comes to mirror not only the corrupting effects of unbridled power, with Rashida's scorched earth policies reflected by her surroundings, but also manifests the internal trauma that haunts her despite attaining her version of freedom.
'Since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain, And hate the idle pleasures of these days.'
All this couldn't work without a central performance to match Qurbani's ambitions, and thankfully, he is blessed with Germany-based Syrian actress Kenda Hmeidan.
From the moment she's on screen, Hmeidan conjures such an aura that it becomes impossible to avert your eyes. The way she gradually goes from scheming sister in the streets of Berlin to tyrannical monster in a wasteland is outstanding, as is the way she allows the traumatism of a survivor of war to peek through and lead Rashida's bomb-scarred psyche to create a new cycle of violence. By the time the character faces her younger self in a dreamlike state and utters the lines 'I am not your opposite, I am the open wound', Hmeidan allows us to see that Rashida's kingdom of rust and dust is the expression of a wounded soul expressing herself through cruelty.
If Laurence Olivier's Richard was imperious and at times appropriately hysterical, Kenda Hmeidan's take makes Rashida smirkingly seductive, brutal and enticingly damaged. Had No Beast. So Fierce. been in Competition instead of the Specials section at this year's festival, there's no doubt Hmeidan would be the performer to beat for a bear.
Qurbani's 'tyrannous and bloody act is done', fuelled from start to finish by this virtuosic performance. His confident and often bleakly playful adaptation never buckles under the cultural weight of the text or its previous adaptations. Which leads to the solace that no Shakespeare was shat on during No Beast. So Fierce.
Audiences and English lecturers rejoice.
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