Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

I saw this at the Palm Springs Film Festival and was blown away! As soon as the movie began, I could tell it was a movie that I should pay attention.The plot is a performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar by a group of real-life prisoners in an Italian prison. I loved how the prisoners could relate to the play by seeing the parallels in their own lives--the power lust, deceit and betrayal. The more the prisoners understood the play, the more they became immersed in their roles.There have been many attempts to make Shakespeare palatable to the modern audience. This was my favorite iteration because it showed the actors trying to understand it, just as an audience might try to find the relevance. As a high school student, I found Shakespeare and Roman History boring. It wasn't until I hit my 40s did I realize this history was more violent than the Sopranos.I don't know if this movie has ever been widely released. I highly recommend seeing it if it ever comes to your town.

The film struck a queer tone that was hard to pin down at first: modest but deceptively so, economic in its time and almost elliptic but yet not quite so, with chunks of life jumping into the rehearsals in an amateur, tongue in cheek, failed way - was this the point? What were the directors trying to do with this film? For as a paradigm of condemning power or exposing with the jarring effect art has the discontents of power this does not work.So what to do with this film? I think the Taviani bros knowingly or not took Six Characters in Search of an Author and turned it into some kind of Six Sentenced Men in Search of an Other, taking Pirandello's theatricality and sophistry and by pushing it to the extreme, to an alienating, subversive context, this would turn the black glove inside out stark white like in the superb cinematography. It is as if Pirandello and Brecht meet: we have the right amount of what was once called 'alienation' and the Pirandellian both sides of the argument, but this is unworkable. It makes irony or simplicity forced and in the very end the "discovery of art that turns the room into a prison" makes for sloppy humanism instead of pungent, elusive and political irony. In a perpetual state of emergency, when remembering the pure, ideological category of - ah! - life before, or after, or now, this turns you into a bad actor and not simply an amateur one as the film showcases.

"Cesare deve morire" ("Caesar Must Die") is the latest movie from brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, experienced (both over 80 years old) Italian directors and screenwriters. In February 2012 it won the Golden Bear, the main prize of the Berlin International Film Festival, and a very strong reception from the audience which seems to continue. So what's it about? Some time ago a friend told the Taviani brothers about the great experience she had watching a play in a small theatre in Rome and so they went to visit it. They went there, loved the actors, and decided to film them creating another play, Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar". All of that doesn't sound like something special but there's a catch. The theatre is in fact in Rebibbia, a high-security prison, and all of the actors are convicts sentenced for various crimes and to a various amount of time (some even for life). That's the most peculiar but also the most problematic thing about this movie.The movie establishes three levels: one on the scene, the enacting of play, and two in the prison, prisoners as what should be their normal selves talking about the play and in their roles rehearsing for the play. The interesting thing is that on all of the levels the movie feels scripted. The moments of rehearsing are, with the help of camera work, editing and music, made to look like they are parts of play itself, whilst the situations when the prisoners are out of character see them still acting ,thus ironically making the actual play on the stage the only nonfictional part of the movie. As you can imagine, it all leaves you a little confused. Of course, it's questionable if the directors even wanted to create everything in that way. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it. But "Cesare deve morire" obviously tackles the theme of the theater-reality relationship and the fact that it's a movie undeniably adds to the equation.What the Taviani brothers pointed as their main intention in doing this movie is drawing the viewers' attention to the human side of the prisoners, and I'm not sure if they succeeded in that. That they in fact worked with amateur actors didn't help. As I've already said, the prisoners seem to act all the time thus denying us any real emotion and depriving us of any empathy. What we can assume is the usefulness of creating the prison theatre group. Both as a useful way for convicts to spend their time and as means to enable their interaction with the outside world. Bearing that in mind, the movie becomes useful as a sort of advertisement reaching to a broader audience.Being the advertisement of course isn't enough to be a good movie, however good the cause it advertises may be. Fortunately, there are a few more good things about it. Most of the movie is shot in black and white and the cinematography, done by Simone Zampagni, is beautiful. The use of the camera transforms prison cells to Roman houses and makes simple courtyards become the Senate and the grand Forum of the Eternal City. It successfully embodies "less is more" principle. The music composed by Giuliano Taviani and Carmelo Travia in the beginning feels mismatched, but when you recognize the rehearsals as the play and the other levels accordingly it clicks in emphasizing the pathos of the tragedy."Cesare deve morire" isn't a movie without its charms. I just feel like the directors didn't successfully accomplish what they were trying to, even if in the process they created something interesting (deliberately or not). That said, it puzzles me why it got the Golden Bear and I can't wait to see some of the other movies from the competition.More reviews at http://onlineimpressions.blogspot.com/

A week has passed since I watched "Cesare deve morire" and I am still trying to decipher the multiple layers on which this film has worked in my mind. The brothers Taviani have directed a masterpiece of 76' which however is so dense in content that the time is waxing inside one's own memory.The Tavianis are documenting the mis-en-scene of a Shakespeare piece inside a prison. Probably the most impressive element of "Cesare deve morire" is the performances of the inmate actors. The fact that the film is shot as a documentary in its natural setting spreads the film in two layers which are seamlessly weaved on each other. On the first level we see the prisoners who are passionately rehearsing the lines of their characters and on the second level we stand on front of Cesar, Brutus and Antonius discussing in the alleys of Rome. As in the case of Bergman, the brothers Taviani are very successfully studying the relationship between theater and cinema. This prison setting is extremely symbolic and renders the actor performances utterly intense. It feels as if the prisoners, lacking their physical freedom, are getting deep into the skin of those new personas seeking the experiences which prison has deprived them of. The performances are so convincing that one has to contemplate on the nature of human destiny. Could it be that one's social condition or even coincidences could make the same persons capable of the best and of the worst? Moreover, the film leads to an unavoidable rumination of the concept of freedom in all its forms.A stark black and white photography pronounces the prison architecture and recreates ancient Rome in its bare corridors. The photography is perfectly self-standing and it would be of great artistic value even in the absence of a plot. The black and white may emphasize the lack of freedom of the inmates but also allows the spectator to ignore redundant information and to concentrate on the performances of the actors. It is remarkable how architectural beauty arises even in a prison. The common spaces are illustrated exceptionally well and after a while one feels lost in a limbo between the prison and Rome.Finally, although the audience reaches catharsis after the end of Shakespeare's narration the narration of brothers Taviani remains unresolved into ones psyche. I personally believe that "Cesare deve morire" is one of those rare cinematic experiences that are capable to shake away well entrenched beliefs. That alone would make the film worth seeing. Gladly, those 76' are so much more.