This is not the story of one man

King Lear's film version performed by Grigori Kozintsev in 1971 is one of the most significant ever undertaken, not especially reliable as adaptation, but by its ability to move a concrete atmosphere to a more personal level, full of captivating aridity.

The story begins with the abdication of Lear and the decision to divide the kingdom among his three daughters, Regan, Goneril and Cordelia. The monarch put them to the test into a broad audience by making express, spontaneously, how they have regard for their father. Regan and Goneril move their emotions without much difficulty, with a speech full of ornaments, of baroque appearance; Cordelia, overwhelmed by their sense of honesty, is unable to turn into words the love she feels towards his father. The outcome of the meeting translates into a division of the territory into two halves: Cordelia is disinherited because of his alleged lack of affection. From this moment, the tragedy unfolds in a tangle of deceptive poses, hidden interests, always ascribed to an egoistic perception of life.

Kozintsev shapes an atmosphere in which the nature acquires a pre-eminent value, where rich metaphorical references underlie in personal relationships. Boris Pasternak's script insists on the helplessness of Lear, which is part of the landscape, imbued by the greatness of the environment and its unintelligible plans. A multitude of different personalities come together to address a number of premises focused both on the political and familiar. If the monarch's power is based on the indivisibility of his possessions, Lear’s decision to fragment the kingdom, firstly, and to disinherit his daughter, later in an act of arrogance, it is understood as the appropriation of an authoritarianism that perhaps does not belong to him. That unrestrained government falls into a personal scale, where the dismemberment of the emotional environment is caused by delusions of grandeur of a character accustomed to implement his decisions without any hindrance.

Shakespeare encourages the protagonist to regret about his arrogance in a context where it is essential a careful interpretation of gestures, of statements going back to the essence of human behaviour. At the same time, the English playwright promotes in the beginning of Lear an exercise in introspection, guilt, atonement, which prints to the play a universal character, outside the bounds of temporality. Shostakovich's musical score, repeatedly praised, enhances the melancholy sense of a story that it is the voice of suffering.