Modern audiences may have a vague idea of Odysseus, the ancient Greek returning hero. They might know about his return to Penelope, his patient and devoted wife, or his somewhat annoying son Telemachus. More literary-minded readers may even think of Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” (1842), James Joyce’s challenging 1922 novel of the same name, or Nikos Kazantzakis’s definitive novel The Odyssey: The Modern Sequel (1924). Or they might be familiar with Margaret Atwood’s retelling Penelope de (2006) or Madeleine Miller’s Circe (2018), which also follows the age-old tradition of pulling at narrative threads and reweaving them from new perspectives. Like Penelope—who only commits herself to one of them after completing a garment that she weaves by day and unties by night, thus thwarting the suitors who arrive after Odysseus is presumed dead— —Storytellers continually reinvent the same ancient fabrics in contemporary ways. Second-rate.
films by Umberto Pasolini, return (2024), starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, is the latest to reweave the tradition, but certainly not its greatest Odysseys. In the film, Fiennes is a middle-aged veteran with unusually strong skin who returns to his hometown and meets people and family he has not seen in 20 years. The landscape he returns to is dry and dirty, sepia-toned environments alternately washed out by sunlight and drab yellow-brick buildings. The smoky, dimly lit interiors of medieval Italian architecture are filled with stand-ins for the original palaces and huts from the Mycenaean era (c. 1600-1100 BC). Odyssey It was meant to happen. But despite our serious efforts to reconstruct Homer’s milieu Odysseyit misses one of the most important threads of his story—namely, the importance of the art of storytelling.
this Odyssey The audience is asked to think about a man who tried and failed to bring his people home, challenging it to understand the intertwined themes of survival, homecoming, identity and the duality of narrative. Indeed, the joys and dangers of storytelling are at the heart of this epic from the first notes to the end: it famously begins with a call to the Muses to “Tell me the story of this man” and ends with a call to the goddess Athena The description ends with her disguised “voice.” These clues link the present to the past and are crucial to Odysseus’ true return: through a maternal figure (his wet nurse, Antikleia), his consort, and his father.
returnOn the other hand, the plot is lost. It makes a number of reasonable and necessary choices by sticking to one of the epic’s narrative arcs and excluding the gods – Athena, due to her immense power and divine difference, would have looked comical in a realistic rendering or absurd. (Our modern gods are distant and mysterious; there are few moving images that translate well to ancient deities.) It follows the spirit of work by Jonathan Shay and others Odysseus in the united states (2002), Odysseus is seen as a wounded, haunted warrior who brings the war home. But to borrow from Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation, the film also makes the man simple. returnOdysseus is terse: he doesn’t tell stories about his past, nor does he use them to manipulate others. He stared. And squinted his eyes. Occasionally bends the body, even when imitating an older and frailer.
Homer’s version of Odysseus—dare I say, Joyce’s or Kazantzakis’s version—is complex and interesting. He’s smart, but his behavior is questionable at times – he’s a man who has gone through pain and changed. But Odysseus return I have no sense of my past. The film seems to exist in an unnameable present. This is most evident in its reenactment of the famous scene in which Odysseus’ long-time nurse Eurykleia recognizes Odysseus by his scar. As the scholar Erich Auerbach has pointed out, this contrasts the Greek epic with the narrative tradition of the Hebrew Bible: the former, Auerbach argued, emphasized surface appearance and narrative detail, while the simplicity of the latter demanded more audience participation. This scene is crucial to Homeric poetics because it demonstrates the associative power of storytelling: everything in the world—and everyone—is an opportunity for another story, another perspective, another view. When Eurelia sees Odysseus’ scar, the story of his name comes to mind. story– all stories, Including our own – becoming infinite and eternal through this constant weaving and unraveling.
exist this returnEurelia, on the other hand, sees the scar and says she remembers Odysseus coming home from hunting. no longer. We don’t see the scars; we don’t see the story. That in itself is a thumbnail criticism of the movie as a whole: it keeps pointing to those CliffsNotes moments Odysseybut did not touch its soul. From the beginning, returnThe sincere promise of a psychologically realistic depiction of the hero returning home is repeatedly undermined. His body – full frontal nudity – epitomizes the film’s strange decisions, a virtual catalog of missteps that situate it neither in the epic past nor in the moving present. Repeatedly shipwrecked and adrift at sea, veterans have cranial veins bulging out on muscular biceps, or eight-pack abs that gleam like Zack Snyder’s extra gear. 300 (2006)? The story suffers from its detachment from place and time, seeming to be searching for a moral center. With the possible exception of Antinous, the suitors were almost all comically evil figures – strutting around and threatening sexual violence and murder against anyone who would listen. Telemachus must have heard them, but he seemed too old to be so useless and whiny. We do hear the first notes of a political theme: “the island is dying” in the absence of Odysseus, who “takes his best men with him,” but this narrative thread remains throughout The old ones, in the end, disappear. What follows is a series of disconnected images: Penelope, mourning the sight of enslaved women having sex with suitors; Odysseus, naked, beaten, and bedraggled.
The death of Odysseus’ father Laertes in the film—an event that never occurs in Homer’s story—was one of the stumbling blocks that bothered me the most. It is well known (to Homeric scholars) that ancient commentators believed that the epic concluded with the reunion of husband and wife in Book 23, but failed to understand the final chapter of Book 24 through Odysseus’ reunion with his wife Addresses the underlying theme of the poem. Laertes and his incomplete reconciliation with his people. Since no one has a past returnHowever, excluding this last book makes sense. Even the story of Argos the dog is wrong: He appears in the movie but doesn’t recognize his owner by smell – Melissa Mueller points out Argos joins series reunion , to confirm the hero’s identity – rather Odysseus says the dog’s name, prompting its recognition, but is then silenced by the hound’s death.
One could charitably say that the mystery of the film is not that others recognize Odysseus, but that he remembers himself. However, the lack of uncertainty makes an ambiguous story – and yes, complex – feel a little underwhelming. Eumaeus seems to have known who Odysseus was all along: halfway through the film, frustrated by his inaction, he admits that he has recognized his master. Although OdysseyPenelope is an unresolved and always fascinating question – we don’t know how she felt when she actually recognized her husband, nor what her thoughts are about the future – Penelope’s return In the scene where she asks the suitors to shoot Odysseus’ bow to prove their credentials, the whole question of her involvement in the game is resolved when she tells Telemachus to “give the bow to your father.” . There is nothing to ask the viewer to think any deeper than the pain in the protagonist’s eyes.
“People love stories,” Fiennes’ Odysseus says as he retells part of the siege of Troy. But there is no joy, love or even interest in the stories he tells. Odysseus only brings a sense of world-weariness to Ithaca, even though they already have much to offer. The film grows stronger as the plot narrows: In the shadow of Odysseus’ home, he kills a man in a battle and stares into the distance while muttering “Kill for pleasure.” people”. Penelope peppered him with questions, believing the lie that he was a war veteran, asking with increasing force, “Has my husband raped, murdered women and children?”
i can imagine seeing this Odysseus is an allegory for the “Western Man.” Here, as we watch war and terror abroad, one can criticize our complicity in violence, raising fundamental questions at the heart of the just civilization we stand for: what it means to be a father and a son, to care for a family and to care What does family mean? Cities, even if we wipe out cities abroad? Fiennes and Binoche’s serious performances suggest this possible depth, but the tone is often wrong. Before Odysseus sets out to eliminate the suitors, Eureka’s lines tell more about Jason Voorhees than about an epic hero: “My children are back. Now you can have them all Kill.”
Perhaps the horror and epicness of Collapse was the plan all along – Odysseus is undoubtedly one of the greatest serial killers in literary history. In this reading, Penelope finally accepts her husband, speaking a truth we all should know: No one is a monster to everyone. The final scene of violence is slow and brutal. This was not a massacre as one might imagine, but a deliberate massacre dong dong The arrow that ends the suitor’s life.
every retelling Odyssey It speaks as much about its time and audience as it does about the mythological tradition surrounding its multi-wheeled hero. I think this is something we can learn from return: This is a violent revenge fantasy, despite acknowledging that trauma in turn shapes both victim and perpetrator. This Odysseus has neither future nor past, only the cool comfort of bleeding, which only creates more.
