The Odyssey (english)

 

A Monstrous Journey

     At first glance, Christopher Nolan's film disappoints its audience, whose dominant impression is one of an unnecessary and costly waste. Why ? Because it depicts a bleak, sad world without any heroism nor enthusiasm, a universe diametrically opposed to the luminous myth of Homer, betraying the epic, masterful and warlike story that one might have expected.

    But this would be to misunderstand the director's intention and the narrative coherence that governs his work.

    In Ithaca, ten years earlier, Odysseus left a harmonious kingdom, a simple and sincere life, a loving wife, an innocent son, and benevolent gods behind him.

    But war will shatter this harmony radically.

    The first culprit in this ongoing cataclysm is Agamemnon. Some critics have, somewhat hastily, compared his character to Darth Vader in George Lucas's "Star Wars." This reductive wink prevents us from grasping his true significance. Agamemnon, whose face, like Vader's, we never see, is not only a folkloric, power-hungry "villain"; he is evil incarnate, or, if you prefer, Death itself. The plume of his helmet, ending in the vertebrae of a skeleton, leaves no room for doubt on this point.

    Like Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men," Agamemnon possesses two emanations. One symbolic (Death), the other embodied in reality (a psychopath). The latter is, of course, perishable.

    While Chigurh is gravely wounded, Agamemnon dies at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra, Helen's twin sister, who thus avenges the ignoble sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia. Logically, the king of Mycenae finds himself in the Underworld. In this fascinating scene where Odysseus comes to submit to his "master" (sorry, his king), he is thus the embodiment of Death itself, reigning over his kingdom.

    Odysseus could not emerge unscathed from the complicity that binds the two characters. He is a man sick with himself, sick with his cunning, his intelligence, his own perfidy.

    The film opens, in fact, with the image of the wooden horse, conceived by Odysseus and built by the Greeks to deceive the besieged Trojans. Strangely, while it would have been much simpler to place it on a pedestal to facilitate its transport, we discover the horse half-buried in the sand of the beach, like the Statue of Liberty in Franklin J. Schaffner's "Planet of the Apes."

  

    Upon seeing the statue, Charlton Heston understands that the earth has been ravaged by the atomic bomb and declares, terrified: "They did it!" Nolan thus makes it clear from the very first images: the original cataclysm has already occurred. 

    This disaster is the ruinous war waged for ten years by the Greek armies under the authority of Agamemnon to reclaim Helen, kidnapped from her brother Menelaus. However, as Odysseus himself suggests, Helen is merely a convenient pretext concealing far less honorable intentions of territorial and commercial domination. By transforming the horse, an offering to Athena, into a motive for betrayal, enabling the rape, pillage, and complete destruction of Troy, Odysseus has committed a sin whose gravity he fully grasps and for which he will have to bear the consequences. The brisk, constant wind, the gray, cloudy sky, heavy as a pall, the snow, the successive storms—all these reflect the character of the gods who have seen and heard everything. The unleashed elements foreshadow a world in decay, where the sun, joy, and even laughter itself have been banished.

    From now on, the world will be unpredictable, the gods capricious, their manifestations monstrous and always ambivalent. 

    The Cyclops Polyphemus is just one example. His supposed (and quite visible) monstrosity is indeed coupled with a surprisingly gentle nature. Far from the garrulous, irascible, and furious giant of the myth, he is, in the movie, a peaceful shepherd, affectionate with his sheep and likely a vegetarian (he lives on cheese). Polyphemus, moreover, is not fiercely hostile to the strangers who have nonetheless forced their way into his lair, and if he indulges in tasting a few of them, it is more out of curiosity than appetite, for their flesh elicits an understandable grimace of disgust from him.

    The arrival of Odysseus and his companions on the island of the Laestrygonians follows the opposite pattern. The travelers encounter a child, a symbol of innocence, but of abnormal size. Upon seeing them, the child lets out a cry of terror of a length and intensity equaled only by one other cinematic voice: that of Oskar in Volker Schlöndorff's "The Tin Drum," a noisy and ludicrous protest against a world gradually descending into the horror of fascism.

    As we have seen, the cosmic balance that reigned between Men and Gods is indeed disrupted and, to put it bluntly, broken.

    The sorceress Circe, at whose home Odysseus and his companions later find refuge, confirms this. Here, Circe is not the enchanting creature evoked by the myth, but a harsh and cunning peasant woman who transforms everything into its opposite. According to what Circe herself tells Odysseus, before their metamorphosis, the magnificent felines that lay along the path leading to her cottage were probably hideous men. Courageous and loyal, Odysseus's companions will thus be transformed into pigs. 

    The collection of deformities resulting from this terrible disharmony of the world would not be complete without mentioning the monster Scylla, who devours six of Odysseus's companions, and, even more disturbingly, the face of Helen herself, whose beauty Menelaus praises on one side and whose disfigured ugliness he deplores on the other side. 

    In this world plunged into chaos, the word of the gods who once advised humankind has become inaudible. As proof, there is the song of the sirens, which Nolan cleverly spares the viewer by having them plugged with wax. Odysseus, however, insists on submitting to their temptation. Like a pilgrim lost on the path to his own redemption, he will retain a bitter and painful memory of it. This allusion to Christ and the trials the devil places into his path will gradually intensify.

    The different stages of the Odyssey indeed suggest the Stations of the Cross, and, like Christ, Odysseus will be provided with twelve companions, or, if you prefer, twelve apostles. In his quest for redemption and his search for a way back to his homeland, Odysseus constantly questions the gods, but finds their words difficult to interpret. And these are not only the gods of the Pantheon. 

    Laying the groundwork, in his own way, for a possible shared history of the great universal religions in the cradle of myth and antiquity, Nolan does not, in fact, invoke Christianity alone. The prohibition against eating pork, which Odysseus observes, is an explicit allusion to Islam. His excessive consumption of lotus flowers at the nymph Calypso's, on the other hand, allows him to achieve inner peace through oblivion, or more precisely, ataraxia—a direct allusion to Buddhism.

    Exasperated, Odysseus finally acknowledges that the gods are no longer of any help to him. From now on, he will have to manage his own way. As in the episode of Charybdis and Scylla, lacking the best path, he decides to choose the lesser of two evils. The gods, whom he defies with his attitude, have abandoned him. Their world is decidedly too vast, their decisions indecipherable. By restoring this world to more just proportions, to human proportions, Odysseus will finally be able to control his destiny. 

    Like Christ driving the money changers from the temple, he repels the suitors who throng around Penelope and cleans house in his kingdom. Locked with them in the throne room, misfortunes no longer fall from the sky, but only from the ceiling. It is a challenge worthy of him, which he overcomes without too much injury, except, like the martyr Saint Sebastian, a career soldier who also performed miracles, for a few arrows.

    If the balance of the cosmos has been broken, the balance of Ithaca (where, as if by magic, the sun has returned) will be restored by the courage and sacrifice of Odysseus, by the fidelity of Penelope, and by the commitment of her son Telemachus.

    As we can see, Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is not a flamboyant movie. It is a twilight quest, coherent and often desperate, that attempts to restore a form of equilibrium and brings the light of reason to a world that has already plunged into darkness and, perhaps, into obscurantism.