tsf-1962 Review of The Trojan Women

The Trojan Women (1971)

a voice from the past, a lesson for the present

[10/10 · 3 January 2007]

It's hard to get excited about Greek tragedy. People in stylized masks and costumes wearing over-sized boots, declaiming verse in front of curtains and pillars . . . Bad Greek tragedy can be worse than bad Shakespeare. But Michael Cacoyannis ("Zorba the Greek") took Euripides out of the library and put him back in the real world in this raw, savage adaptation of perhaps the greatest anti-war play ever written. Euripides was the most popular poet of the ancient world, although his leftist ideology has made him a whipping boy for elitist critics from Aristotle to Nietzsche, who prefer the more patrician Aeschylus and Sophocles. "The Trojan Women" is a stirring indictment of imperialist aggression at a time when democratic Athens was involved in a protracted war with totalitarian Sparta (the inspiration for Plato's Republic). The good-guy Athenians were the aggressors, invading islands that didn't tow the line, exterminating the men, enslaving the women--and in the process alienating the Greek-speaking world and losing the war as the brutal Spartans came off as the good guys by comparison. The parallels with today's world situation need hardly be mentioned, but suffice it to say that when they're threatened democracies can be as brutal as dictatorships. Cacoyannis has fashioned a stark, uncompromising rendition of Euripides' play with a dream cast--Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Genevieve Bujold (Clint Eastwood's love interest in "Tightrope") and Irene Papas. Brian Blessed ("I, Claudius," "The Black Adder") has the only significant male role. A movie well worth seeking out.