Kritiken

The film demonstrates the possibility for art to literally overcome even the most cruel of human institutions: it’s a touching testament to the emancipatory urgency of freedom.

[The Taviani brothers] bring Shakespeare's drama into sharp focus. At 77 minutes the movie contains only the most crucial scenes from Julius Caesar, yet the Tavianis condense the play expertly, revealing the essence of each major character. What doesn't come through in the dialogue is expressed by the prisoners' faces and bodies. Hardened by years in jail, the men embody the cunning, duplicity, and violent instinct of Shakespeare's conspirators.

Wryly humorous touches abound. Chided by Cavalli for slowness, Rega responds: "I've been here 20 years and you say let's not waste time!"... The Tavianis hardly need to emphasise the relevance of the play as a whole to current Italian politics; that, they most likely feel, is a given.

The isolation and anger of prison bleeds into every moment. One particularly brilliant sequence shows the men putting their all into auditions, as the Tavianis superimpose crimes and sentences under each actor. These are offenders who needed a prison stint, and yet the greatness of the play can't help but emphasize common humanity.

So solid is that conception, and so resonant the text in which questions of freedom and slavery are paramount, that the impact can hardly be diminished.

Suavely shot and set to a moody jazz score, the movie is spare but slick. The performances, some verging on psychodrama, are equaled in power by the prison mise-en-scène. The drama's imposing Caesar, every inch a prison capo, encountering the obsequious soothsayer as he traverses the enclosed bridge from one cell block to another, Antony delivering his eulogy alone in a walled concrete prison yard.

Again and again, the Tavianis seem to want you to infer something about the inmates from the lines they recite, as when Cassius (Cosimo Rega), while washing his hands in Caesar's blood, states that the assassins' scene will be repeated, a nod at past and future murders as well as at other less bloody performances. You can only guess what the lines mean to the inmates, who register as atmospheric blanks at best and brutal exotics at worst...

Though the Tavianis' intent is clear—to comment on the thin line separating part and performer, as well as on the quite literally liberating powers of art—the meanings rarely emerge with any elegance or resonance. Hardly a dish fit for the gods.

As the inmates act out their roles, moving freely about the stark and brutal prison architecture, the substance of the play and the reality of their circumstances merge in uncanny, sometimes ironic ways. Passions flare as the case for the honorable murder of Caesar is made. The words are Shakespeare's, but they take on a heightened meaning when the actors happen to be killers serving life sentences.

The Tavianis make inspired use of starkly lit corridors in the prison to bring the play life. Where many a theater director has stumbled with the crowd scenes in the play (for instance, Mark Anthony speaking to the mob after Caesar's murder), these are handled deftly with effective camera placement and prisoners appearing in their cell windows at various points.

The play's conflicting demands of power and friendship and its air of menace come through with an eerie gravity, and contemporary Italian diction (featuring the actors speaking in their regional accents and dialects) lends ancient history a jolting currency.

If the film's commentary on the corrupting power of contemporary Roman politics deserves neither overwhelming praise nor burial through dismissal, the brothers' riff does drive a stake through platitudes about the healing power of art. "This cell has [now] truly become a prison," laments one player once the performance is over—an indictment that cuts as deep as any shiv.