The cinematic reception of the myth of Medea has usually followed the text of Euripides’ Medea (see for instance the Medeas of Pasolini and of von Trier, or the recent French movie Médée miracle shot by the Italian director Tonino De Bernardi). The Mexican director Arturo Ripstein, trained at Luis Buñuel’s school, released in 2000 Así es la vida, a movie based upon Seneca’s Medea, but set in contemporary Mexico City. In keeping with Ripstein’s poetic vision of the ‘tragic’ (seen also in his earlier Profundo Carmesì), the characters are not heroes, but losers of low social status, and the set is a squalid and degraded suburban block of flats. Ripstein keeps the dramatic structure of the Senecan pièce as well as its artificiality: the film includes a surreal tragic chorus (neither Pasolini nor von Trier nor De Bernardi used the chorus), and a continuous flaunting of the camera (some characters speak directly to the ‘invasive’ and personified eye of the camera itself) and of the reproduced image (almost every room presents a television turned on). Altogether Así es la vida is astonishingly close to the Senecan text, as is evident, for example, in the spatial structure of the set during the last terrible murder committed by Julia/Medea.
La Medea di Seneca di fronte allo specchio cinematografico. Así es la vida di Arturo Ripstein
DANESE, ROBERTO MARIO
2013
Abstract
The cinematic reception of the myth of Medea has usually followed the text of Euripides’ Medea (see for instance the Medeas of Pasolini and of von Trier, or the recent French movie Médée miracle shot by the Italian director Tonino De Bernardi). The Mexican director Arturo Ripstein, trained at Luis Buñuel’s school, released in 2000 Así es la vida, a movie based upon Seneca’s Medea, but set in contemporary Mexico City. In keeping with Ripstein’s poetic vision of the ‘tragic’ (seen also in his earlier Profundo Carmesì), the characters are not heroes, but losers of low social status, and the set is a squalid and degraded suburban block of flats. Ripstein keeps the dramatic structure of the Senecan pièce as well as its artificiality: the film includes a surreal tragic chorus (neither Pasolini nor von Trier nor De Bernardi used the chorus), and a continuous flaunting of the camera (some characters speak directly to the ‘invasive’ and personified eye of the camera itself) and of the reproduced image (almost every room presents a television turned on). Altogether Así es la vida is astonishingly close to the Senecan text, as is evident, for example, in the spatial structure of the set during the last terrible murder committed by Julia/Medea.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
