Cesare deve morire
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (2012)
Here’s a film that it would be great to watch without knowing anything about it beforehand. Yet if I hadn’t known anything of it beforehand, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see it. (The Taviani brothers, now octogenarians, are big names in auteur cinema but I don’t know their work at all: trying their latest was far from a foregone conclusion.) At the start of Caesar Must Die, you assume it’s a documentary about a staging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by prisoners in the high-security wing of the Rebibbia prison on the outskirts of Rome. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani started on this project after attending a reading of cantos from The Divine Comedy by lifers at Rebibbia; introducing the production of Julius Caesar, the prison governor makes it clear that theatre pieces are a regular event there and that Fabio Cavalli, who’s about to cast the Shakespeare, is the usual director of these. The first half hour of Caesar Must Die is gripping: we see the final scene of the eventual staging, the enthusiastic audience (and cast) reaction, the audience leaving the theatre. We then move back in time six months – and from colour to black and white – to watch the progress of the production. In the auditions each prisoner is asked to state his personal details – name, date and place of birth, father’s name – and to do so twice, first in sorrow then in anger. Cavalli announces who will play the main parts in Julius Caesar; as each name is announced, the prisoner steps forward and a legend on the screen indicates the length of his sentence and the nature of his crimes. The original Italian of these legends, and their English translation, amount to quite a lot of words. It’s not easy to take them in fully but it’s clear that all the men are in jail for many years – in some cases, for ‘life meaning life’ – and that they’ve been imprisoned for murder or drug trafficking or for Mafia-related crimes. Simone Zampagni’s chiaroscuro lighting of the faces and flesh of the prisoners reinforces the power of the images that the men present. Auditions in films are almost always absorbing to watch but this sequence is exceptional and creates very high expectations of what’s to follow. So does the beautiful, melancholy main theme of the music, written by Paolo Taviani’s son Giuliano and Carmelo Travia.
From this point onwards, the Tavianis present the rehearsal process in Rebibbia and, in doing so, an abbreviated version of Julius Caesar (the film lasts only seventy-six minutes all told): what we see is sequenced according to Shakespeare’s order of scenes. It soon becomes clear that Caesar Must Die is more than a documentary – but perhaps less than a documentary too. The text of the play, which is mostly rendered in language simpler and more colloquial than the original, is complemented by ‘real’ conversations between the prisoners. The film is a singular experience: we’re watching people who could be the subject of a straightforward documentary – prisoners staging Julius Caesar in the place where they (have to) live – but who are actually playing not only the characters in Shakespeare but also the people they really are. The exchanges between the men may not be scripted but they are shaped. Sometimes these exchanges comprise just a few lines. Occasionally they’re more extended and dramatic – as when Giovanni Arcuri, who plays Caesar, tells Juan Dario Bonetti (Decius Brutus) what he really thinks of him. The layering is absorbing and you get a jolt whenever you remind yourself of the men’s true identity. This happens less often as the film progresses, though. Rebibbia becomes a place for location filming; the longer you watch the men, the more they are performers – and more remarkable when they’re inhabiting characters in Shakespeare than when they’re pretending to be themselves. I think this is why the cast’s celebration as they take their bows at the end the play has such impact (and is infectious): it’s a moment of transition from performance to reality – and the reality at this point is purely documentary. Although this has nothing to do with the Tavianis’ approach, there’s something lost in translation for an audience lacking a good understanding of Italian. In spite of the facial and vocal richness of the people you see and hear on the screen, you inevitably lose the variety of the prisoners’ dialects.
I was most strongly conscious of the artificial aspect of Caesar Must Die at one of its most dramatic moments, which occurs both in the opening section and again when, in the final minutes of the film, the final scene of Julius Caesar in the prison theatre and its aftermath are reprised. (The last shots in black and white are of the audience arriving for the performance in the theatre; the Tavianis then revert to colour.) After they’ve enjoyed the wild applause and the audience has left, the main actors return to their cells. What struck me about this bit even on the first occasion was that Arcuri, Cosimo Rega (Cassius) and Salvatore Striano (Brutus), as each waits for a guard to unlock his cell door, looked less like prisoners returning to real life (life meaning ‘life’) than like actors expressing abjection – the hangdog set of Striano’s body suggests this especially. I couldn’t make sense of this at the start of Caesar Must Die. I could by the end, though, and the effect is underlined on the second occasion by Cosimo Rega’s saying, once he’s back under lock and key, ‘Since I got to know art, the cell has become a prison’. Salvatore Striano is the outstanding performer in the cast – he’s an instinctive and a charismatic actor – and, in a very strong competition, the most compelling face in evidence. The closing credits provide a capper that’s worthy of a fictional conclusion to the story we’ve been watching. Legends explain what has happened to the principals. Arcuri and Rega have both published accounts of life in prison but Striano was pardoned for his crimes and, we’re told, has acted professionally in theatre and in films since being released. This is an amazing and, you feel, a deserved happy ending for the star of the show. In a further plot twist, I discovered, when I read up on the film afterwards, that Striano, who’d been serving time for Camorra activities, was in fact released in 2006 – and aptly made his screen debut two years later in Gomorrah. He returned to Rebibbia as a free man for the making of Caesar Must Die.
26 April 2013
