The Merchant of Venice

Written sometime between 1596 and 1598, The Merchant of Venice is my Shakespeare's later discovery.
As you might already realized, I'm in a XVI century phase... I can't help it and I love it, therefore, my Netflix account (an online video rental) is burning with XVI century tittles.

The Merchant of Venice, the movie, has been my latest acquisition and regardless my hopeless straggle with the language (i'm not use to proper English really) I watched the 2h and 10 min of the film till the very end without blinking.
I have been very surprised for the quality of the movie because I didn't heard of it before so I thought it would be a mediocre version. None of this at all.

The Art Direction, by Jon Bunker, and the Production Design, by Bruno Rubeo, are both over the top, from the very beginning of the movie you can feel the colors of the time, the surfaces, the atmosphere... terracota, green, mustard... the look of the film is fantastic, and I'm glad it is so or I wouldn't bear the more than 2 hours of film understanding very little (as i mentioned before, my language straggle...) and not enjoining it with my eyes in awe.

But of course, how not to speak of the costumes!! This is the best XVI century movie I've ever seen, Sammy Sheldon, Costume Designer, who worked also in Gladiator, has all my bows. Even though I read somewhere that Radford [the director] did not want a strict depiction of costume during the period but a rather more stylised overall look, I found the wardrobe very inspiring and real and I didn't have the impression at any time of dealing with "theater", but with dresses straight from that époque.

Sammy said about the experience: "English costumes of this period were very big and decorated with triangular skirts but in Venice all through that century everything is much sexier and softer, really the proper kind of renaissance style. One of the big motivations for it was paintings, Mike liked Sargeant paintings, the whole kind of feel, texture, the lighting in it. They were used as a colour reference."

We try to generalize fashions but even in the same country fashions differ. It is quite interesting, as I said in some posts earlier too, to see this fact during the XVI century, a moment when the whole Western world was boiling in history facts and so, fashion followed (does this sentence make any sense?) ... For this reason movies whose stories happen at the same time in different countries can be so unlike in terms of fashion; Elizabeth (Britain), The Merchant of Venice (Italy), or Queen Margot (France) as to say. Those were the days when globalization and China goodies were still far away...

My favourite outfits so far were the ones worn by the Venetian prostitutes.
I regret I didn't take any pictures from the film, i just thought "I will find images enough on internet... such interesting outfits!" But i was very wrong and now i don't have any sample to prove what i saw.
I found, though, a drawing from a Venetian courtesan whose dress is, although not the same, the closest i could find, that is, breasts out and horn-like hair-do, isn't it lovely?
If i "find" the nerve enough to do it, i will dress like that in this upcoming Halloween.
More on prostitutes during the XVI century in Venice here.