Word: centaurs
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Medea is instead a powerful evocation of another era, albeit one which probably never existed. The film is prefaced with a centaur recounting to his four-year-old adopted son the true details of his ancestry as the child sits watching him. The centaur talks on, with many references to kings, captures, and so forth. "Do you understand?" he asks. Cutting back to the naked child, we see him gazing into the sky. "Oh well," the centaur continues. "It's a difficult story. It's so full of deeds, not thoughts...
...plot, as the centaur says, is just deeds, and what gives this film its peculiar and forceful immediacy is the spirit in which these bizarre and seemingly unmotivated events are accepted. Director Pier Paolo Pasolini takes his story readymade, as he did earlier (1964) in the Gospel According to Saint Matthew. He makes no attempt to explain why such things came about, but merely how they must have happened--and how they appear to the participants, not to a modern audience. Taking Christ's life, he worked with Romans and peasants, shepherds and carpenters. With the story of Medea...
...ANCIENT man," the centaur has told the young Jason, "myths and rituals are a regular part of existence." Employing the approach of neo-realism, Pasolini renders convincing a completely fantastic story and setting. This might be--as we watch the peasants file past, each dipping a finger in the bowl of a sacrificed victim's blood--a documentary made by time-traveling anthropologists. Magic has its place in this society, but the common people are close to the land, to nature. The landscapes--mountains and deserts, blazing skies, sun-baked cliffs riddled with cave-dwellings--surround Medea until she returns...
Jason (played by Giuseppe Gentile), robust, curly-haired and cheerfully handsome, adds the touch of reality that is the core of Pasolini's treatment. "The unreality of the real" is another phrase of the centaur's, and Jason exemplifies it. Lightheartedly he sails off in search of the Golden Fleece, takes Medea when she falls in love with him, gives up his kingdom when his uncle breaks his promise and won't cede it to him. He winks at his girl cousins when he first sees them standing in demure attendance round their father the king. Without any outward signs...
...camera cut from a speaking character to the listener or the speaker turned his back. This lack of dialogue strengthens the film's tangibility by having people do things rather than speak them, and it gives the impression of a pre-literate society in which few people but the centaur have much to talk about. Nor does Pasolini, Except for the centaur's prologue, there's no telling, just showing...