Sunday, July 5, 2009

Dionysus Unbound

Satyricon(The Degenerates) Directed By Federico Fellini


A poor poet dies leaving nothing and asks to be buried with the stars and the sky and the contents of his mind, while a wealthy merchant dies and asks that in order to receive his inheritance his friends must eat his corpse, so that they may gorge themselves on him in death, as they have in life. Matthew 26:26: "While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread and blessed it. Then he broke it in pieces and handed it to the disciples, saying, "Take this and eat it. This is my body."Those two deaths one at the beginning and one towards the end, bookend this movie, about the depths of greed and the pursuit of pleasure.On the cover are two faces one an old man(the poor poet) the other a young boy whose two teachers (one of whom is the protagonist) are rivals for his affections...? Distraught over the lose of his boy lover, the young teacher roams ancient Rome and winds up in a whirlwind journey, where among other things, he is sold as a slave and made the wife of a pirate captain, to the kidnapping of as sickly hermaphrodite being worshiped as a God. It's visual quality makes up for some of it's narrative flaws. There is no one to root for here so to speak, and the plot occasionally losses itself, but watching it again, I'm still impressed.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus#Modern_views

1 comment:

neillgrant said...

still have to see this 1