\n\t\t<\/aside>\nModern audiences may have a vague idea of \u200b\u200bOdysseus, 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” <\/em>(1842), James Joyce’s challenging 1922 novel of the same name, or Nikos Kazantzakis’s definitive novel The Odyssey: The Modern Sequel <\/em>(1924). Or they might be familiar with Margaret Atwood’s retelling Penelope de<\/em> (2006) or Madeleine Miller’s Circe<\/em> (2018), which also follows the age-old tradition of pulling at narrative threads and reweaving them from new perspectives. Like Penelope\u2014who 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\u2014 \u2014Storytellers continually reinvent the same ancient fabrics in contemporary ways. Second-rate.<\/p>\nfilms by Umberto Pasolini, return <\/em>(2024), starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, is the latest to reweave the tradition, but certainly not its greatest Odyssey<\/em>s. 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 <\/em>It was meant to happen. But despite our serious efforts to reconstruct Homer’s milieu Odyssey<\/em>it misses one of the most important threads of his story\u2014namely, the importance of the art of storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nthis Odyssey<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n
\n\t\t\t\tDora Wheeler Keith, Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night (1886), embroidered silk, 45 x 68 inches ( 114.3 x 172.7 cm), from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Image via Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nreturn<\/em>On 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<\/em> in the united states<\/em> <\/em>(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. return<\/em>Odysseus 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.<\/p>\nHomer’s version of Odysseus\u2014dare I say, Joyce’s or Kazantzakis’s version\u2014is 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<\/em> 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\u2014and everyone\u2014is 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, <\/em>Including our own \u2013 becoming infinite and eternal through this constant weaving and unraveling. <\/p>\nexist this<\/em> return<\/em>Eurelia, 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 Odyssey<\/em>but did not touch its soul. From the beginning, return<\/em>The 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 <\/em>(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.<\/p>\n\n
\n\t\t\t\tRalph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope return<\/em> (2024), directed by Umberto Pasolini (Image courtesy of Bleeker Street)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe death of Odysseus\u2019 father Laertes in the film\u2014an event that never occurs in Homer\u2019s story\u2014was 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 return<\/em>However, 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. <\/p>\nOne 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 Odyssey<\/em>Penelope 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 <\/em>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.<\/p>\n\u201cPeople love stories,\u201d Fiennes\u2019 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?”<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n\n
\n\t\t\t\tLovis Corinth, Odysseus Fighting with the Suitors (1913), oil on canvas, 89 3\/10 x 107 2\/5 in (89.3 x 273 cm), at the Galerie Berlin (Image from Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\ni can imagine seeing this<\/em> 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.” <\/p>\nPerhaps the horror and epicness of Collapse was the plan all along \u2013 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<\/em> The arrow that ends the suitor’s life.<\/p>\nevery retelling Odyssey<\/em> 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<\/em>: 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.<\/p>\n\n
\n\t\t\t\tRalph Fiennes as Odysseus in movie stills return<\/em> (2024), directed by Umberto Pasolini (Image courtesy of Bleeker Street)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n\t<\/div>\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Modern audiences may have a vague idea of \u200b\u200bOdysseus, 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14372,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist"},"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14371"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14417,"href":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14371\/revisions\/14417"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}