In this retelling of the story of Hamlet, the young man is a soldier on leave to attend his widowed mother's marriage to his uncle - a marriage which is unpleasantly near in time to the death of his father. Every element of Shakespeare's tragic story is present, except that, this time, Dede refuses to kill anyone, no matter how persistent his father's frustrated ghost is.
Acting
Luc Thuillier's exhausted everyman energy is painfully relatable.
Writing
Wickedly smart adaptation that interrogates why we NEED revenge stories.
Director
Jean-Louis Benoît
Luc Thuillier
Dédé
Hélène Vincent
Yvonne, the mother
Didier Bezace
Raymond
Yves Afonso
Maurice, the father
Renée Faure
The grandmother
Marion Grimault
Monique
Jacques Mathou
Vicar
Michel Berto
Louis
Philippe Demarle
Michel
Michel Didym
Jacky
Michel Winogradoff
Marcel
Salvatore Ingoglia
Patrick
Fernanda Borsatti
Margarida Vila-Nova
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Benoît strips Hamlet to its domestic bones — no castles, no poison, just a cramped apartment and a man who'd rather be literally anywhere else.
Part of a wave of 1990s French cinema reimagining canonical texts through working-class, contemporary lenses — Dede is the anti-hero as exhausted everyman.
FR
