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Caesar Must Die (2012)

Director: Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani

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From Time Out London

When it was announced that ‘Caesar Must Die’, the new film by veteran Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, had won the Golden Bear at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, a surprisingly large proportion of those who’d attended the event greeted the news with bemusement, even open hostility. Clearly, quite a few of those commentators hadn’t quite grasped what the Tavianis were getting at (one writer even claimed the film was a documentary); others simply hadn’t bothered to see the film. Which only goes to show how long the brothers – now both in their early eighties and once widely acknowledged as major European arthouse directors for the likes of ‘Padre Padrone’, ‘The Night of San Lorenzo’, ‘Kaos’ and ‘Good Morning Bablyon’ – have been out of the limelight.

Not that the Tavianis haven’t been producing good films in the last two decades. But it’s fair to say that ‘Caesar Must Die’ is the brothers’ most satisfying work since 1990’s ‘Night Sun’. It takes a simple idea – following the preparations for a stage performance of Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ by a group of inmates at the Rebibbia maximum security prison – from which it mines an impressive variety of riches. Beginning with the end of the triumphant performance, and then flashing back to the start of casting and rehearsals, the film’s mere 76 minutes are more resonant than many far longer films, thanks to the way the Tavianis explore the complex relationship between life and art.

Frequently the actors themselves – many of them mafiosi serving life sentences for murder and drug-related crimes – comment on how and why the loosely adapted play feels relevant to their own experiences; at other times, we the viewers are left to work out precisely what’s meant to be part of the production and what isn’t and to draw our own conclusions about the import of what we’re seeing and hearing. Either way, the Tavianis’ subtle play with the shifting strata of reality and artifice ensures that nothing in the film can simply be taken at face value. In terms of meaning, it constantly operates on more than one level.

Inevitably, then, Shakespeare’s tale of commitment, betrayal and power struggle is made to reflect not only on the dynamics of the prison population but on contemporary – and yes, more specifically, contemporary Italian – politics. As such, the film is entirely characteristic of the Tavianis in that it is a witty cautionary tale of failed idealism, revolutionary communal action, endless cyclical Utopianism and the value and concomitant cost of a commitment to art. As one inmate confides upon returning to his routine existence after the exhilaration of a rapturously received performance, ‘Ever since I discovered art, this cell has truly become a prison.’

Even at this stage in their lives and careers, the Tavianis remain deeply aware of such contradictions and paradoxes, and it’s this that makes ‘Caesar Must Die’ so humane, intelligent and affecting.

Author: Geoff Andrew

Time Out London Time Out Online

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