Word: medea
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MEDEA, by Euripides, is a tale of vitriolic passion. The heroine (Irene Papas) is a sorceress from Colchis. She falls in love with Jason (John P. Ryan) and helps him regain the Golden Fleece. In the process, Medea betrays her father and murders her brother...
Ever since Maria Callas' dwindling voice made operatic appearances hazardous, the soprano has looked for things to do. She made a movie of Medea, took up teaching (an opera class at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music) and hinted at a return to the stage. Now, at 48, she has asked a friend, Actor Raf Vallone, to create a suitable movie role for her. Vallone is working on a scenario for a prima donna's dream -Callas is to play Callas in a movie about Callas. "She is one of the very few great individuals we have...
...conflicting characters of Jason and Medea provide the same interplay between real and fabulous. Medea, leaving her homeland with her new lower Jason, purposefully kills her brother and cuts him into pieces. These she carefully deposits in the path of her pursuing father, who must pause to pick up each bit and prepare it for burial. Thus she escapes with the eminently human Jason, a healthy young man who beds Medea with a cheeky grin at the camera...
With hardly a word Maria Callas conveys the extremes of Medea's superhuman passions--her obsession, turning to jealousy, for Jason; her tender love for her children; and the cold cruelty of revenge and finality with which she kills her two sons. She does not act but rather moves with naturalness, with complete assurance and belief in herself...
...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 of wonder...