Measure For Measure: Aussie gangster take on the Bard is a glum and muddled way of saying payback doth be a bitch

By Liam Lacey

 Rating: C

 At the start of the Australian crime melodrama Measure for Measure, a meth-addled Afghan war vet goes on a racist shooting spree at a Melbourne housing project. 

The bloody event affects characters’ lives in ways that spread and converge, in a film that attempts to bring Shakespearean perspective to contemporary social ills.

Hugo Weaving is an Australian mobster who leaves his business in the wrong hands in Measure For Measure

Written by director Paul Ireland and co-writer Damian Hill – and very loosely adapted from Shakespeare’s play of the same name - Measure for Measure is an attempt to say something about contemporary Australian racism and violence. Though much of it is glum and muddled, it does find an anchor in Hugo Weaving (Lord of the Rings, The Matrix) as a gravely wise, ailing crime boss named Duke.

Because of increased police presence, Duke is compelled to go into hiding after the shooting incident. He leaves his underling, Angelo (Mark Leonard Winter), whose wide-eyed gaze and smirk loudly signals his sociopathy) in charge of the loan-sharking business.

In Shakespeare’s play, which was a kind of dark comedy, the Duke of Vienna pretends to go on a diplomatic mission, but disguised himself as a friar so he could monitor his over-strict judge, Angelo. Given that friar costumes are terrible disguises today, the Duke monitors his operations from a network of surveillance cameras with feeds to his penthouse apartment, like a really powerful security guard.

A second plot, lifted from another Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet, sees the coming together of lovers from different backgrounds, but living in the same building complex. Sensitive electronic musician Claudio (Harrison Gilbertson) and hijab-wearing Afghan university student, Jaiwara (Megan Hajjar) end up spending the day together in Melbourne. There, they fall in love, which brings new dangers. Jaiwara’s criminal brother, Farouk (Fayssal Bazzi) is incensed that his sister is involved with an infidel.

Like several other members of the bad boy gangsters, Bazzi’s performance is set to “histrionic” (he was much better in the Netflix series, Stateless) and we have to endure such lines as: “I will cut your heart from your white chest!”

Instead, the jealous brother soon arranges to get Claudio tossed in jail, where muscular bald men in tattoos threaten to do bad things to him. Jaiwara, desperate to help her boyfriend, goes to Angelo for assistance. 

You don’t need to brush up on your Bard to guess that a sleaze-ball like Angelo is going to put a price on a favour. Or that Duke isn’t going to let him get away with it. For as Shakespeare oft noted, payback doth be a bitch.

Measure for Measure. Directed by Paul Ireland. Written by Paul Ireland and Damian Hill. Starring:  Hugo Weaving, Harrison Gilbertson, Megan Hajjar, Mark Leonard Winter and Fayssal Bazzi. Measure For Measure can be seen on various video on demand platforms.