This year’s Oscar for Stupidest Comment by a Director goes to Uberto Pasolini.
Pasolini – director of The Return, a version of The Odyssey, starring a super-fit Ralph Fiennes, 62 – said of Fiennes’s ripped body, ‘I was slightly suspicious that ... we would have a body that looked exercised... There is no gym in ancient Greece.’
Erm, Uberto, the Greeks invented the gymnasium. The word comes from the Greek gymnos, meaning ‘naked’ – a state in which we observe a full-frontal Fiennes at one point.
There are lots of blunders in The Return – which concentrates on Odysseus’s return to Ithaca after 20 years fighting the Trojan War and criss- crossing the Mediterranean.
Odysseus wasn’t shipwrecked on Ithaca, as he is in this film. He was delivered there in first-class comfort by the Phaeacians from what is thought to be Corfu (where much of The Return was filmed). And in Homer’s epic, Odysseus’s father, Laertes, doesn’t die before he fights the suitors.
But, still, The Iliad and The Odyssey are protean – their stories are so primal and so well-known that they can bear infinite re-invention.
And they are Procrustean, too: they are so crammed with incident that, like Procrustes’s victims for his bed, they can be chopped down, like this 116-minute film, into shorter episodes.
The Odyssey is having a big revival at the moment. Next year, Christopher Nolan brings out his film of the story, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus.
Last year, Stephen Fry’s inspired, loose translation came out. And, in 2017, Emily Wilson (daughter of The Oldie’s A N Wilson) published the best translation yet of The Odyssey.
You can see why writers and directors keep returning to it – all those enchanting mini-stories wrapped up in the overarching epic.
However many times you read or see them, they work, as they do in The Return: the death of Odysseus’s dog, Argos, in shock at seeing him after
20 years; the heart-stopping joy when Eurycleia, his old nurse, recognises her disguised old master, Odysseus, from the boar tusk wound in his leg she first saw in his youth.
Some of the stories are slightly mangled. In The Odyssey, Penelope recognised Odysseus only once he’d identified the bed he’d made out of an olive tree. In the film, you see the olive-tree-bed scene but Penelope has recognised him before – so that recognition moment is lost.
But Penelope’s repeated unravelling of the shroud at night – she had promised to remarry once it was finished – becomes a clever plot-control device. Every time she unravels the shroud, it’s a kind of break, opening a new chapter.
The dialogue – by Pasolini, John Collee and Edward Bond – is a bit wooden and simplistic, with none of Homer’s majesty. And there’s the backwards-speak that dud writers use to denote olden-days posh talk: ‘Ten long years, the heroes fought.’
Craig Brown spotted the phenomenon in royal commentators in his biography of Elizabeth II, A Voyage Around the Queen. ‘Never safer, better-guarded lay a sleeping King than this,’ Richard Dimbleby said in 1952 of George VI’s lying-in-state. Brown calls it ‘the curious back-to-front phraseology standard on royal occasions’.
Some of the acting by the supporting cast is straight out of SPADA – The School Play Academy of Dramatic Art. Where. Actors. Say. Every. Word. Separately. And. Too. Clearly. As. If. They. Are. Reading. A. Script. Out. Loud.
The film is saved by Ralph Fiennes’s Odysseus and Juliette Binoche’s Penelope – both actors know how to speak naturally on screen. Where in Conclave Fiennes was so understated as a cardinal as to be boring, here his quiet calm is pregnant with the rage and duty of an avenging king.
Even though – or specially because – you know what’s going to happen, the thrill is magnified when Odysseus, after long days of plotting, finally strings his bow, fires the arrow through the axe handles and slaughters the suitors with clinical, supreme aim.
Binoche underplays her semi- bereaved longing for a long-lost husband she suspects is dead – and so the deep sadness in her eyes is magnified, too.
Matt Damon should take note in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey next year. When you’re playing the greatest heroes in Greek mythology, less is more.
Harry Mount is author of Odyssey: Ancient Greece in the Footsteps of Odysseus (Bloomsbury)
