by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Michael Cacoyannis
CAST: Irene Papas, Kostas Kozakos, Tatiana Papamoschou
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: [Not scored]
PLOT: In ancient Greece, King Agamemnon, in order to appease the gods, is told he must sacrifice his favorite daughter, Iphigenia, before his troops can march to war.
To my mental library of favorite closing shots in cinema, I must now add the final image of the engrossing Greek film Iphigenia. I won’t spoil it, but the hatred in the eyes, the set expression of the face, spell out exactly what will follow in the years to come without saying a word. It’s cinematic, yes, but it’s also theatrical, expressing oceans of passion (good or bad) with a stare instead of a monologue.
Director Michael Cacoyannis’ filmed adaptation of an ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides (Iphigenia in Aulis) does not immediately seem like the kind of film I would cotton to. I’ve never read any of the ancient Greek plays, nor have I ever read the Iliad or the Odyssey, though I am familiar with their plots…barely. This is not the kind of literature I have traditionally sought out, and I am content in my decisions. But a weird thing happened while watching Iphigenia. After a somewhat rocky start, I became enthralled with the language these characters were using. I don’t mean the Greek language itself, but the subtitles used in the English translation. I cannot say with any certainty how closely the subtitles mirror what is actually being said, but if they’re even just fairly accurate, then I now understand, at least to a small degree, why these plays have endured for millennia.
The story itself is one that has undergone countless interpretations and revisions over the course of history. King Agamemnon (Kostas Kozakos) and his vast army are ready to set sail for war against the kingdom of Troy, but their ships are stranded by a lack of wind. The seer Calchas informs Agamemnon that the winds will not blow until he sacrifices his eldest and favorite daughter, Iphigenia, to the goddess Artemis, who is withholding the winds because his men have offended her by killing a sacred deer. (And now I know where the title of The Killing of a Sacred Deer [2017] comes from…knowledge really IS power!)
Agamemnon agonizes over this decision, but his hand is forced by the eagerness of his troops to sack Troy; he’s afraid they’ll mutiny if he doesn’t go through with the sacrifice. He invents a pending marriage of Iphigenia to the great warrior Achilles to get Iphigenia to the encampment, but Clytemnestra (Irene Papas), her mother and Agamemnon’s queen, tags along unexpectedly. The rest of the movie churns with gloriously over-the-top melodrama, as Clytemnestra rages at Agamemnon, Iphigenia pleads for her life, and Achilles swears to defend Iphigenia at all costs. Agamemnon also argues with his brother, Menelaus, in a terrific scene during which they both change each other’s minds just a little too late. In the meantime, the winds never blow, the Greek troops grow restless, and the seer waits a little too eagerly for the chance to carry out the impending sacrifice.
It was during Agamemnon’s argument with Menelaus that I really started to perk up. This is not an easy scene to write or act out. Even with English subtitles, the sentence construction and syntax were occasionally overworked. I remember thinking at one point, “Huh…this is almost Shakespearean.” Except these scenes were written roughly two thousand years before Shakespeare was born. When that concept smacked me in the face, I started paying attention a little more to the style and the passion of the words. And I can’t explain it, but everything acquired a new dimension. It started to feel more like a play than a film. It became – at the risk of sounding a tad abstract – poetic.
That feeling permeated everything after that scene. Throwaway scenes felt more immediate, and really important scenes felt monumental. Sure, there is some overacting, particularly from the actor playing Achilles, but really, it’s called for in this scenario. When Clytemnestra promises her husband that, if he goes through with the sacrifice, she will accept his will but hate him for the rest of her life…I really felt it. And it’s not just the language, but the zealotry of the acting on display, especially from Irene Papas, who must have salivated at the chance to play this fiery woman, a proto-feminist who accepts her duty as a queen but never lets the king forget who truly rules the roost.
And then there’s Iphigenia herself, played by a waifish, almost elvish actress I’d never heard of before seeing this movie, Tatiana Papamoschou. In her first scenes, she’s almost too innocent to be taken seriously. It’s only when Iphigenia learns of her father’s plans to murder her for the sake of war that Papamoschou’s acting style allows her to really embody the character, and she delivers a speech late in the film that is, for lack of a better word, biblical. She accepts her fate and shames the men around her with the same surgical precision that can be found in the Gospels when Jesus accepts His own fate while dismantling the Pharisees with His words. There are monumental themes at play behind the scenes, and “normal” dialogue just would not feel adequate.
And then there’s that final shot. I did a tiny bit of research on the original play, and when you learn what historically happened to the main characters after the play’s events, that last look carries even more weight, foretelling decades of death and tragedy without saying a word. That a foreign film of a 2,200-year-old play was able to affect me this greatly was very pleasantly surprising to me. I doubt any newer version with today’s technology or modernized dialogue would affect me the same way. Iphigenia was a very pleasant, surprisingly effective discovery.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 