REVIEWS
Reviews edited by Mark Adams
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Caesar Must Die REVIEWED BY LEE MARSHALL
Now into their eighties, the Taviani brothers show with this remarkable, fresh and moving drama- documentary they have lost none of that mix of observational rigour and sympathy for the under- dog that marked early films such as Padre Padrone, their 1977 Palme d’Or winner. Caesar Must Die (Cesare Deve Morire) is a powerful prison drama about drama in prison: specifically, about a stag- ing of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with a cast of prisoners from the high-security wing of Rome’s Rebibbia jail. It would have been easy to make the film as an
inspirational tale of lifers finding comfort and crea- tive release in acting. But what gives Caesar Must Die real heft and resonance is the way the directors use the Shakespearian text, the prison setting and the rehearsal process to blur the boundaries between drama and reality and to turn the Bard’s political tragedy into a film that makes resonant points about brotherhood, longing, regret and the pain of incarceration. In fact the Tavianis make the point that for a lifer, creative awakening can be a burden: as one of the film’s jailbird actors says to camera towards the end, “Since I discovered art, this cell has become a prison.” International audiences will lose some of the
nuances of a film in which each prisoner speaks Shakespeare’s lines (freely adapted in places to make them less fusty and literary) in his own dia- lect; or the darkly ironic double sense that comes out in the oft-repeated phrase subtitled here as ‘honourable man’ (many of Rebibbia’s high-secu-
n 8 Screen International at the Berlinale February 12, 2012 COMPETITION
It. 2012. 76mins Directors/screenplay Paolo and Vittorio Taviani Production company Kaos Cinematografica International sales Rai Trade,
www.raitrade.it Producer Grazia Volpi Executive producer Donatella Palermo Cinematography Simone Zampagni Editor Roberto Perpignani Music Giuliano Taviani, Carmelo Travia Main cast Salvatore Striano, Giovanni Arcuri, Cosimo Rega, Antonio Frasca, Juan Dario Bonetti, Vittorio Parrella, Rosario Majorana, Vincenzo Gallo
rity prisoners are inside for Mafia-related crimes — they are, in other words, ‘uomini d’onore’, or ‘men of honour’). But these nuances will not pre- vent a film that was well received at its Berlinale competition press screening from reaching out to arthouse audiences worldwide. The film opens, in colour, with the culminating
scene of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the death of Bru- tus; gradually, the camera’s tight focus pulls back to reveal we are in a small theatre, with an audi- ence. A caption informs us this is the high-security wing of Rebibbia prison, and we see the actors being locked back in their cells. Then we backtrack six months, and switch to black and white — a purely aesthetic decision which pays off, turning the prison interiors and grounds where the rest of the film will be shot into a place of limbo, a kind of mythic space. The soundtrack, which alternates saxophone lilts with big Hollywood-style orches- tral highlighting, works to the same end.
The Julius Caesar project was apparently initi-
ated by the Tavianis, but in the film the directors keep themselves out of the picture: onscreen, we see only Fabio Cavalli, the non-inmate director of the stage play. In a strangely compelling scene that mixes dramatic intensity with flashes of humour, we watch a succession of prisoners auditioning by giving their names and other details in different registers determined by two separate dramatic scenarios; the scant information we glean from this is supplemented by terse captions that tell us what these men are inside for and how long they are serving. Some are camorristi, some are drug dealers, a couple are murderers; their sentences range from 14 years to life. After the actors have been assigned their roles,
the film moves on to the play proper — presented through fragments of scenes played out with a min- imum of costumes (a white sheet for Caesar, a black t-shirt for Mark Anthony) inside the prison and out in the exercise yard. The essence of Shakespeare’s play is presented with impressive economy but there is another layer to the scenes, as the line between learned lines and real ones, between life inside and rehearsal, begins to blur. Just occasionally this game feels a little scripted,
but then again the occasional stilted line or perform- ance carries its own pathos. We are constantly reminding ourselves these men may be playing at being Ancient Romans, but they are not playing at being locked up.
SCREEN SCORE ★★★★
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