Review: Medea / Tickets
As part of their series of “two-pack” releases, Facets Video offers a “Dazzling Directors” collection that features two films that draw from international masters of the form.
Enfant terrible of the Danish film industry Lars Von Trier might well exhibit this adaptation of “Medea” as a defense of his talents. In this 1987 television production Von Trier uses many of the same natural techniques he would later push in his Dogma movement, but holds back on the outrageous shock quotient, creating a solemn and beautiful work that hearkens back to Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring” in its raw evocation of ancient times.
Adapted from an unproduced screenplay by the great Carl Theodore Dreyer, who in turn based his work on the play by Euripides, tells the story of Medea (Kirsten Olesen), who exacts a disturbing and blood-soaked revenge on her husband Jason (Udo Kier) — he of the Argonauts fame — after he betrays her to marry a princess.
Von Trier isn’t adverse to a few technical tricks, though — when emotions run high, he puts his actors in front of color-washed video screens that pull the drama outside of reality and into a realm of emotional terror that is fitting and disconcerting. It’s an altogether grim production and largely silent, allowing the visuals to usher in a decrepit poetry that services the story far better than any banter could.
“Medea” goes a long way to lend Von Trier some intellectual and artistic credibility — you can see the dark roads he walks in his shocking modern tales of distress, and forgive him for at least attempting to match the older ones in levels of intensity. If more people saw this production, he might find himself championed for his artistic mastery of the form, rather than his brash assault on our sensibilities — or maybe he just needs to focus and draw from better material, as he did here.
As companion for the double billing, 2005’s “Tickets” offers a trio of interlinked stories taking place on a train to Rome. Three directors — Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi — offer incidents that hint to larger personal stories that are momentarily woven together in time and space.
In the first story, an aging professor struggles with a momentary flirtation that his imagination won’t let him shrug off — a captive to his seat on the train and his computer that begs him to work, he focuses on all the angles that the conversation brought out, while acknowledging the sadness of such an exercise.
In the second, an abusive older woman contends with a personal assistant who is diverted by a couple specters from his past.
In the third segment, three goofy and rowdy Scottish football fans face a moral dilemma involving an Algerian immigrant family.
In each story, it’s not so much what is stated as what is left untold that is important. Each character is a a lost soul incapable of seizing any moment during an awkward situation — a witness to something in life that they obvious don’t totally comprehend. The drama is forged from the looks on their faces, the movements of their bodies and the suspicions in the mind of the viewer who has become yet another person on the train. It’s a game that everyone plays when they have to wait in airports and doctor’s offices, when they travel on subways or buses, stand in elevators — the game of figuring out the other people’s stories through the small slices of their lives you receive in your brief time with them.
As complimentary features, these two films — each lovely in opposite ways —work well together. “Medea” is about as dark as a movie can get, while “Tickets” will leave you with some hope.
