2023-08-07 07:33:52
by Maurizio Porro
The new film by the actor and director at the Locarno Film Festival. Which investigates today through the carnality of a rewriting of Shakespeare’s tragedy in Roman dialect
LOCARNO Crowds in Piazza Grande yesterday evening for the popular Edoardo Leo who directed “I am not what I am – The Tragedy of Othello”, a courageous film, a gift for 50 years out of the comfort of comedies. «I had been thinking about Othello for years, but for the pleasure of playing Iago. The great work was translating Shakespeare into Roman dialect without modifications».
We are in 2001, Lazio perimeter of Neptune, sordid environment of the underworld, noisy discos (other than poor Desdemona’s Willow song), alcohol, drugs in rivers. But Othello was a brave warrior… «Yes, but also a murderer who killed his wife out of jealousy, not for a handkerchief but for a veil, a hijab, the cause of the tragedy in the perfidious preparation of Iago who disappears in the tragedy and I in the film I find him in prison after thirty years of telling the story. Let’s make it clear, Othello is a criminal. It is enough to acquit him in the name of a romanticism that expires day by day with feminicides, racism, fake news, three themes that I am targeting ».
Leo plays all his mastery as an actor, also visible in the brilliant genre, he isolates the characters outside reality but inside their theatricality. Forgetting poetry: risk? “We can’t afford sentimental discounts, I’ve cut out the parts in which Otello tries to come to terms with himself, years of honor killings, I bind myself to him with handcuffs”. Two faces of Evil. “My Othello is the contemporary criminal, I removed the noble halo but without touching the text, the public must not feel empathy, still too many residues of a patriarchal culture justify sick love relationships”.
macho Shakespeare? «Not him, the society of the time, I wanted to make everything accessible and today the dialect has the carnality and immediacy that the Shakespearean language had, without diminishing its poetry». Now for Leo there is the film by Liliana Cavani (“L’Ordine del Tempo”), while he is taking a sabbatical year from the cinema with the theater, he will be on December 13 and 14 at the Arcimboldi in Milan with “I’ll tell you a story”: «Enough with the comfort zone of comedy in which I have relegated myself, I have always done theater, I come from the school of Proietti, my deepest nature is also linked to dramatic choices: I don’t want to make career calculations, only the things that interest me without wanting to please everyone.”
August 7, 2023 (change August 7, 2023 | 07:33 am)
© Time.News
#transform #Othello #contemporary #criminal #time.news