[The following review contains SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]
There is a centaur in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea.
Not a literal centaur, mind you; as the mythological creature explicitly admits, he’s merely a metaphor. Over the course of the narrative, he manifests in two distinct forms: first as the traditional half-horse, then later as an ordinary human being. These contradictory shapes symbolize the story’s central conflict: the tension between (respectively) faith and rationality.
The latter philosophy is perfectly personified by the male lead, Jason. The quintessential classical hero—a term with significantly different connotations in the context of antiquity—the legendary captain of the Argo refuses to accept the notion that his path has been preordained by forces beyond his comprehension, preferring instead to believe in an entirely material world governed solely by self-determination. His knowledge of the universe extends no further than what he can physically touch: the territories that he conquers, the loot that he plunders, the women that he seduces and exploits. And in his insatiable pursuit of wealth and power, he is willing to break any oath, vow, or pact—no matter how sacred.
This arrogance costs him dearly.
His titular tragic lover (and the movie’s true protagonist), on the other hand, is unwaveringly pious. Revered as a high priestess in her native country of Colchis and feared as a pagan sorceress by the Greeks, Medea recognizes the presence of spirits and deities in every nook and cranny of nature: in the gentle caress of the midday sun, in the searing heat of ceremonial flames, in the warmth of the sacrificial blood with which her people anoint their crops to encourage a fruitful harvest. Consequently, she is also an ardent fatalist. Although she frequently experiences prophetic visions of the future, she makes no effort to avert the misfortunes that they portend; indeed, she’ll obediently follow a premonition of doom even to its bitterest conclusion—for such is the will of the gods and the destiny of all mortals.
This dogmatic zealotry has equally disastrous repercussions.
Shot with the unpolished immediacy of an ethnographic documentary (a stylistic choice that clashes beautifully with the otherwise fantastical plot) and featuring a culturally/temporally ambiguous setting that emphasizes the ancient source material’s universal themes (albeit not quite to the same degree as Pasolini’s own adaptation of Oedipus Rex), Medea is a brilliantly unconventional and thoroughly modern interpretation of the works of Apollonius of Rhodes and Euripides—as clear in its artistic ambitions as it is unclassifiable in its execution.
And there's a freakin' centaur in it; what a picture!
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