The Odyssey

THE ODYSSEY   ***

Christopher Nolan

2026

IDEA:  Following the Trojan War, Odysseus and his men go on an arduous journey to return home to an Ithaca in ruins.

BLURB:  With his version of The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan whittles the epic poem into one of his favorite stories: the brilliant but morally conflicted man whose work estranges him from his family, and his humanity. The filmmaker’s fixation on this brooding archetype has become as expected as his predilection for nonlinear cross-cutting and cacophonous soundscapes, but what is surprising is how richly it fits into Homer’s text. Nolan’s Odysseus — played by Matt Damon in a register much closer to morose than vainglorious — undergoes a modern reframing as a reluctant, guilt-stricken hero burdened by postwar trauma. His conscience flares in soul-sick visions of Athena and slivered flashbacks to the chaos of the Trojan War (among the places where Nolan’s fractured editing works best), culminating in a stirring, plangent third-act catharsis that recontextualizes the war through Odysseus’s profound shame and regret. As per usual, Nolan wants to ground even the most fantastical of ideas in a sense of realism, so the modern psychology applied to Odysseus is echoed in set pieces and other characters that are brought down to human scale (pointedly, none of the gods appear). In some ways, this feels like a symptom of Nolan’s paucity of visual imagination; he still seems indifferent to the concept of mise en scène, preferring spartan locations and quick, static close-ups of actors over more epic-friendly wide shots composed in depth, and his color palette remains mostly limited to dusky blacks, blues, and browns, with yellow highlights. Yet the aesthetic does end up suiting this grittier, sepulchral Odyssey, particularly in such standout scenes as the invasion of Troy and the visit to Hades, which are given an equally haunting moral weight (and in the latter, a killer monologue from Elliot Page, second only to Anne Hathaway in bringing real theatrical fire to the film). Ludwig Göransson provides a reliably robust, eclectic score, and Nolan’s incessantly loud sound mix, for once, feels well modulated around his actors. When Odysseus returns home, so does The Odyssey bring home its thesis of how powerful men poison society with self-interest and ignobility, and how easily we enable them. It’s a not-so-subtle lament that rings out a resounding cry in a retelling acutely tailored to our modern times.

Attenberg

ATTENBERG   ***

Athina Rachel Tsangari

2010

IDEA:  Living with her terminally ill father in a small industrial seaside village in Greece, 23-year-old Marina struggles with issues of intimacy and independence. 

BLURB:  Leading from its title — a mispronunciation of the last name of Sir David Attenborough — Attenberg depicts a society in which language and conventional structures fail to adhere. Not only is the figure of symbolic authority, the father, literally on his deathbed, his power is already diminished in the eyes of his daughter Marina (a persuasively guileless and ungainly Ariane Labed), who imagines him without a phallus. Marina is in a developmental limbo where social institutions introduce a radical otherness she’s unable to assimilate. So she regresses to the pre-verbal, anti-social comfort of acting like an animal, or mirroring her friend Bella in a bodily synchrony that forestalls the anxiety of difference. This colorful, confounding dysfunction is often played for droll comedy, but it never yields the kind of shock-jock sadism that sometimes infects the work of Tsangari’s fellow Greek Weird Wave auteur Yorgos Lanthimos (who, ironically, appears in this film as its most normal, affable character). The behavioral perversity and formal austerity that comprise Attenberg are undergirded by empathy for Marina’s clumsy stabs at self-actualization, a process Tsangari analogizes to a wider, Greek national crisis of identity formation. At the same time, for all its quirks, the film mostly hews to the beats of a typical coming-of-age story, including the retrograde implication that maturity is achieved through heterosexual sex. But Tsangari leaves us not with her heroine’s triumphant initiation into adulthood, but with an ominously lingering shot of one of the industrial landscapes that have appeared throughout the film as a sign of stunted growth. The construction continues.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER   ***1/2

Jean-Luc Godard

1967

IDEA:  Housewife and prostitute Juliette goes about her day in a modernizing Parisian banlieue. 

BLURB:  How does one write about 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her? It’s a question Godard must have anticipated, considering how much the film is about the limits of language and the inadequacy of words in capturing the complexity of people, feelings, and experiences. The image might not be much better, the auteur mischievously and ironically suggests, whether he’s self-reflexively debating which ones to use in his film or trying to limn a consumer capitalist culture where images are reduced to commodity signs, and people and things are reduced to images. Yet Godard’s own capacity for communication never seems stymied, even when he’s at his most willfully abstruse and audience-antagonistic (a tendency that was about to become much more obnoxious). With Raoul Coutard’s vibrant color cinematography and production design festooned with commercial objects, 2 or 3 Things uses the surfaces of consumer culture to reflect on what they conceal. The film’s digressive, disruptive form resists the efficiency and digestibility of the society it critiques. Godard conveys meaning through oblique vignettes and juxtapositions: an apartment serving simultaneously as a brothel and daycare; prostitutes with airline-branded tote bags on their heads; overloud urban noises and men pulling random quotes from piles of books. There is acid cynicism in the resulting collage of a deranged modernity, but there is also freedom in taking it all apart, in letting the actor-objects shoot back our gaze and muse on the frustrations and desires unsolved by materialism, on granting fashion magazines and groceries existential weight. Maybe, a cup of coffee really can reveal the universe.