We live in an age held captive by the tyranny of the narrative. Not the stories in the books and films about the world we live in themselves: rather, the stories we tell about the stories. The back stories. The imprimatur of authenticity, which apparently, only come through the pain and suffering and anguish and agony that accompanies the gestation of a cultural statement. Somehow, anything less can’t be the real deal.
This is largely marketing hype of course, and I’ve become rather cynical. For that reason, Caesar Must Die at first ticked all the wrong boxes: Shakespeare performed behind bars, venerated directors making a comeback after toiling for decades in relative obscurity. But Dear Reader, I am pleased to report that I was very very wrong indeed.
Rebibbia Prison is on the outskirts of Rome. A maximum security prison, inmates are serving long terms for consorting with the wrong sort of people, selling drugs and organized crime, that sort of stuff. One gets the sense that lengthy incarceration allows for a certain wry perspective on life. Not quite gallows humor (obviously), but not far removed. “I’ve been here 20 years and you say let’s not waste time?”
Caesar Must Die is anchored by preparations for a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by inmates (thus the title). Directed by the Taviani Brothers, the film is not documentary but rather dramatic enactment, following rehearsals for the prisoners’ moment in the spotlight. The entire prison becomes their stage, and fictive and factual worlds entwine inextricably.
The Taviani brothers, Palme d’Or winners at Cannes in 1977 but with a relatively low profile in recent decades, both started their careers as journalists. I think this feeds into the film, a basic curiosity in the why – much more than the what – underpinning Caesar Must Die. Put aside for a moment the fact that it is mobsters and gangsters who are the principals of the film. What matters, and what is communicated effectively, is the humanity that they bring to their roles.
It is farcical to pretend that the status of the thespian/prisoner does not count for something though. Julius Caesar, the play, is built around hubris, vanity and betrayal: no surprise that our principals find common ground with Shakespeare’s text. “Excuse me, but it feels that this Shakespeare lived on the streets of my city,” one remarks in astonishment. Which is pretty high praise if you think about it.
It is a double edged sword, though. After their moment of triumph, they return to their cells and the reality of their everyday lives. “Since I got to know art, this cell has become a prison,” one muses. There is the postscript offering some prospect of optimism: one inmate gets a book deal, another is pardoned. But this is sticking plaster on the gaping wound that the film opens, the sense that Art is democratic and the benchmarks with which we gauge humanity might actually reside in us all. It might very well be that some things are best left well alone.
Life does have entertaining ways of imitating fiction, though. Staying with contemporary Italy: the immediate past Prime Minister convicted for soliciting favors from an under-aged prostitute; the balance of political power manipulated by a comedian-turned-politician (aren’t they all, come to think about it?); a moribund economy; unbridgeable chasms between left and right, north and south. No wonder so much of the population take refuge in the make-believe world of the country’s notoriously tacky television.
Reality, written and directed by Matteo Garrone, takes this premise one step further: television as real life. Luciano, a Neapolitan fishmonger, is rather self-regarding and runs a sideline in petty insurance fraud. Nothing personal, one understands, just another routine way of making ends meet in a hardscrabble and humdrum existence. But then a chance encounter with a star of the Italian version of reality television programme Big Brother lights a spark: that could be me.
Appearing on a reality television program strikes me as being not the most pragmatic career progression plan, but Luciano – egged on by adoring family, nuclear and extended, inveigles himself into the principal auditions for the show in Rome. Quite how much this long shot matters – and not just to Luciano – becomes abundantly clear when he returns home for the audition, and his neighbors grant him the welcome one normally associates with triumphant warriors.
Reality is a painfully funny film, a painful film, about how we have lost the capacity to recognize ourselves for what we really are. You know the old philosophical argument about trees falling in forests but not happening if no-one being is there to hear the sound? It’s like that. Not to get lost in the old cliches about the dignity of hard work and so on and so forth, but what Reality presents is the discomfiting proposal that ordinary life no longer has any value. Wealth and fame and notoriety are the only currency that matter. And if one can achieve all these through that least tasking of professions, professional celebrity, so much the better. A life not acknowledged on television no longer has real value. Nobody gets to see it, you see.
Writer/director Garrone has played about with the murkier aspects of real life before. Gomorrah, his last film from 2008, was about the equally improbable search for fame and fortune, albeit through Naples’ notorious crime families. Reality, in a different way, is incisive social commentary. No guns are involved, but his evocation of modern day poverty is just as brutal. A poverty of expectations will always prod some people into making morally compromised choices. By the time Luciano – convinced that he is being spied upon by talent spotters for the show – begins to give away his belongings, to make a better impression and improve his chances of being selected for the show, one appreciates that his moral compass has gone dreadfully awry.
Garrone is a sly filmmaker. He never moraliszs, but presents enough of the reality of everyday life to prevent us from thinking of his film as a simple absurdist comedy. There is something of a fairytale turning dreadfully sour (the score emphasizes this mutation with subtlety). And then there is Luciano, who lurches from excitement and optimism to desperation, then finally enters a very dark place as his reality crumbles about him.
My principal reservation about Reality is that it does not make as much as it could about the impact of social and environmental factors on mental health. Increasingly, the improbable is dressed up and presented as unequivocal fact. We don’t live the lives of the Real Housewives of wherever, or Jersey Shore, or any one of the multitude of programs supposedly drawn from real life; we can’t look like the augmented artifice created by the unholy alliance of Photoshop and plastic surgery. The problem with the intrusion of “reality” on real life is that it distorts the benchmark that we all stand alongside. And gradually, we lose sight of who we really are, or could be.
Caesar Must Die (Cesare Deve Morire) (Italy, 2012, 77 min, Italian with English and Hebrew subtitles)
Directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, based on Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Starring: Salvatore Striano, Cosima Rega, Giovanni Arcuri, Antonio Frasca
Reality (Italy, 2012, 115 min, Italian with English and Hebrew subtitles)
Directed by Matteo Garrone, Starring: Aniello Arena, Loredana Simiolo, Claudia Gerini
