'Titus': The cold style of revenge as primitive therapy for all the unquiet spirits of a cruel age. The ritual purging, or exorcism, of horror, grief, and rage. The inevitable meeting, in this Arena of Cruelty, of sadistic cynicism - represented by the Moor - with malicious seductiveness - represented by the Goth Queen - has for its equally inevitable issue the Child of Darkness and of Blood: This child is Man, of course, surviving alone in a damaged Universe, and about to be penetrated by the first shafts of daylight's painful disillusionment. But life that lacks an illusionistic carapace is far too tender to exist, as this drama relentlessly exposes.
For the ritual, stylized, excess, of what is presented to us as the nightmare obsession of a psychologically damaged child, will conduct us through the dream-like anaesthesia of self-defensive shock - just the degree of brutalization that enables our humanity to survive the hallucinatory trauma of being in a mad world.
No accident (surely) that the film's visual experience is grounded in the ancient Roman ruins of the former Yugoslavia's dismembered body-politic; nor that it is also grounded in the terminally Roman decadence of Mussolini's operatically-gesturing Fascist fantasies, but as those already overblown fantasies were subsequently replayed in the sinister parodies thereof provided in Antonioni's, or in Fellini's work.
The disembodied phantoms who finally appear to have been silently attending to all that (seemingly) has passed before our own eyes, in the insistent image of the Stadium of Death, which is the Arena of Taymore's Shakespeare-mediated Senecan spectacle, are themselves - like their representative, Lavinia, - mute witnesses to the scenes relentlessly paraded before us in that Circus of Horror, which signifies nothing less than the very Orbit that circumscribes this World of Suffering.
Having discovered so much contemporary - that is to say, eternal, - sense in the ancient spectacle of Senecan tragedy - the smallest symbolic details of the poetic language of which are brilliantly transferred into the film's visual imagery, and consistently re-worked in the retro-modern, comic-book pastiche of the Savagery that was Ancient Rome - , Julie Taymor achieves the unnervingly sublime poetry of excess and horror better than perhaps any creative intelligence since Thomas Lovell Beddoes, or Ken Russell - even proving a match for old Seneca himself.
Indeed, thanks to this film, at last a modern audience can understand the disturbing Senecan vision. The ostensibly wooden characters of this grand-guignol type of tragedy provide that reductio-ad-absurdum of human beings who are abruptly shorn of all that signifies their humanity: Lavinia's truncated gestures are eked out in wooden trimmings, her hands a puppet's dumb-show, her tongue a stick scratching in the dirt's dusty eloquence like an epigraphy of some ancient grievance, long since past remedy.
Sick humour comes as the final parodic relief: Titus has a splendid jest with Death, indulging to the full the satisfying conceit of making the murderous mother of such murdering and murdered offspring of her womb the grave of these her own children. Thus all partake of the ultimate communion with Death.
Such sinister hospitality provides the totally negative resolution of the tragedy - at least, as Shakespeare wrote it, having opened this dark Senecan vein, - for it brings no saving reconciliation whatever, but only the savagely cathartic perversion and total annhilation of all that was human.
That is why we recognise nothing living or human in such a completely unreal spectacle.
That is why we are forced to recognise ourselves for the surreal spectacle to which we have been reduced by our insane history.
This is how the outraged sensibility is healed: By madness - by a term in Hell. Such nightmares are the pain of the mind as it tries to heal itself.
This process of purgative disillusion is what Taymor is about, here. The ending is another birth - in terms of personal symbolism, a re-birth. And this is, very particularly, a female artist's determined resistance to the general mayhem of a largely male-dominated world: Incomprehensibly far beyond all the destructive logic of the unending abuse of nature, She continues to entrust her innocent flesh and blood to another incalculable day.
This remarkably profound and intelligent film is also graced by astonishing technical finesse in every department, from costumes to cinematography.
Next to 'Titus', the splendidly macho 'Gladiator' seems like just another Hollywood action movie (which of course it is).
For the ritual, stylized, excess, of what is presented to us as the nightmare obsession of a psychologically damaged child, will conduct us through the dream-like anaesthesia of self-defensive shock - just the degree of brutalization that enables our humanity to survive the hallucinatory trauma of being in a mad world.
No accident (surely) that the film's visual experience is grounded in the ancient Roman ruins of the former Yugoslavia's dismembered body-politic; nor that it is also grounded in the terminally Roman decadence of Mussolini's operatically-gesturing Fascist fantasies, but as those already overblown fantasies were subsequently replayed in the sinister parodies thereof provided in Antonioni's, or in Fellini's work.
The disembodied phantoms who finally appear to have been silently attending to all that (seemingly) has passed before our own eyes, in the insistent image of the Stadium of Death, which is the Arena of Taymore's Shakespeare-mediated Senecan spectacle, are themselves - like their representative, Lavinia, - mute witnesses to the scenes relentlessly paraded before us in that Circus of Horror, which signifies nothing less than the very Orbit that circumscribes this World of Suffering.
Having discovered so much contemporary - that is to say, eternal, - sense in the ancient spectacle of Senecan tragedy - the smallest symbolic details of the poetic language of which are brilliantly transferred into the film's visual imagery, and consistently re-worked in the retro-modern, comic-book pastiche of the Savagery that was Ancient Rome - , Julie Taymor achieves the unnervingly sublime poetry of excess and horror better than perhaps any creative intelligence since Thomas Lovell Beddoes, or Ken Russell - even proving a match for old Seneca himself.
Indeed, thanks to this film, at last a modern audience can understand the disturbing Senecan vision. The ostensibly wooden characters of this grand-guignol type of tragedy provide that reductio-ad-absurdum of human beings who are abruptly shorn of all that signifies their humanity: Lavinia's truncated gestures are eked out in wooden trimmings, her hands a puppet's dumb-show, her tongue a stick scratching in the dirt's dusty eloquence like an epigraphy of some ancient grievance, long since past remedy.
Sick humour comes as the final parodic relief: Titus has a splendid jest with Death, indulging to the full the satisfying conceit of making the murderous mother of such murdering and murdered offspring of her womb the grave of these her own children. Thus all partake of the ultimate communion with Death.
Such sinister hospitality provides the totally negative resolution of the tragedy - at least, as Shakespeare wrote it, having opened this dark Senecan vein, - for it brings no saving reconciliation whatever, but only the savagely cathartic perversion and total annhilation of all that was human.
That is why we recognise nothing living or human in such a completely unreal spectacle.
That is why we are forced to recognise ourselves for the surreal spectacle to which we have been reduced by our insane history.
This is how the outraged sensibility is healed: By madness - by a term in Hell. Such nightmares are the pain of the mind as it tries to heal itself.
This process of purgative disillusion is what Taymor is about, here. The ending is another birth - in terms of personal symbolism, a re-birth. And this is, very particularly, a female artist's determined resistance to the general mayhem of a largely male-dominated world: Incomprehensibly far beyond all the destructive logic of the unending abuse of nature, She continues to entrust her innocent flesh and blood to another incalculable day.
This remarkably profound and intelligent film is also graced by astonishing technical finesse in every department, from costumes to cinematography.
Next to 'Titus', the splendidly macho 'Gladiator' seems like just another Hollywood action movie (which of course it is).