User Reviews

A bunch of convicts in a maximum security prison, suddenly face a new challenge: to prepare and stage a William Shakespeare play in-house.

Much as for many of them it initially became an excuse to spend more time outside their cells, in the process each of them had to come face to face with their own selves, the issues with one another as well as their fate.

On this note, this is an area that this film excels in the sense that this group of people are happy to train to act as anyone else but themselves.

To their credit they gave their all but it was not easy as consciousness begun to kick in and the struggles appeared. During this time, they forgot they were convicts, some lifers, but became actors who lived in the time of Caesar.

The most profound moments appeared after the end of the play when the inmates stopped pretending they were actors and had to face the reality that heir cell was once more a prison and staring at the ceiling for infinity resumed.

For a 76 minute film, it has substantial depth and takes the audience into a journey of forgetfulness, reality and transformation.

"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.

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Viewed at the Lobero Theatre on January 28, 2013, during the Santa Barbara International Festival at 11:00 A.M. Reviewed by Larry Gleeson. "Caesar Must Die,"a masterful rendition of a filmed play, a narrative and a documentary all seemingly rolled into a one of a kind colossal piece of work in a "quick" seventy-six minutes. The film is directed by the Taviani Brothers who choose to begin the film with what appears to be a filmed play as we see a staged play in color and an up-roaring applauding audience paying great respect to what they've just witnessed. And, just as quickly as the audience applauded, the film cuts to black and white and thus begins the feel of a documentary as we discover what we're seeing are prison inmates going for auditions in a Roman prison.

The casting agents request the actors who all seem to e Italians with a natural dramatic flare built into their genetic make-up,to recite personal data – name, birth date and place of birth, pre-incarceration city or town of residence – first emotionally distraught and then again defiantly angry with surprising results of great intensity and with subtle humor. Here overlays provide their convictions and the lengths of their sentences and we become privy to the fact that these are hardened criminals. For those who are familiar with the original "Dirty Dozen" a resemblance can be ascertained. Much like the stockade soldiers being sent behind enemy lines to carry out a dangerous mission, our inmates are volunteering to take part in a pilot program to introduce art into the Roman prison system.

Interestingly enough, the theater director allows the men to speak in their native dialect and to find within their respective life experience as common ground with the character they are portraying. The character of Julius Caesar is played by Giovanni Arcuri with swagger and determination. Brutus is played by, in my opinion, the most interesting cast member, Salvatore Striano. Pardoned of his crimes in 2006, Striano took up acting and returned to the prison to participate and work in this production.

Furthermore, watching the inmates rehearse and run lines within the prison added an unbefore seen experience of Shakespeare for me. What at first appeared as a lifeless existence being incarcerated, I watched these inmates become re-animated performing daily routines and mundane chores.

The reality of the inmates being returned to their cell in the evening and hearing the closing and latching of their cell doors was a powerful reminder of the seriousness of their existence. A telling affect the experience had on the inmates shouts loudly in a mild-mannered tone as the inmate Rega serving a twenty year stretch breaks the fourth wall and comes right into the theater screening stating, "Since I have known art, this cell has become a prison." Indeed, the power of dramatic art to form and shape and experience can be so profound. I took a chance on this viewing with a large group of retired Rhodes scholars and I feel I was handsomely rewarded. Highly recommended to theater and film buffs alike.

This movie was extremely disappointing! Perhaps because I had high expectations after reading about the number awards it had won. I thought there was an obvious opportunity lost to create a richer narrative by delving deeper into the backgrounds of each of the inmates and then relating it back to the play. At the start they introduce each player along with their crimes committed. I was curious to find out what had convinced them to decide to audition for the play in the first place and what participating in play meant to them personally. Though there were hints of this for example when the inmate who plays Brutus has a momentary pause about how a line in the play conjures a memory of an exchange with a friend from his past, this moment is brushed immediately aside and the actors continue to rehearse.

Though film depicts the passion of the inmates to excel as players well, the lack of dimension in the overall story made the film very unsatisfying.

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.

The Taviani brothers' Caesar Must Die (2012) is a very disappointing film for me. The Taviani's had a great concept here, but really failed in the execution of that concept and the resulting finished film is just unconvincing, in my opinion. I had to stop watching this film about half way through because I just couldn't take any more.

This film does fit into the genre of Meta-Cinema, but fails to take effective advantage of the creative freedom, and the unique opportunities that this genre affords the filmmaker.

The convicts who assume the roles in the Shakespearean play are not at all typical convicts. Reviews of this film reveal that the inmate theater is an established program at Rebibbia Prison and the "casting" of the convicts for the play clearly shows that. These "convict actors" seem to be well worn "retreads" of this inmate theater program, at least in their appearance to me.

ALL of the footage in this film is "staged" including not only the actual stage performance of the play, and the "rehearsals" held in various parts of the prison, BUT ALSO even the discussions that the cast members have with each other about the play, AND EVEN their interaction with the civilian director. So there is no "real" convict behavior displayed in this film whatsoever, because it is ALL acting.

There is no interaction between the convict actors, and the general prison population, which is a shame because such interaction would have been fruitful to illustrate how the concepts inherent in the play, and the very role of being an actor might have affected the convict actors' interaction with the other prisoners.

Overall, I would place this film in my own personal genre of Cinematic Oddity. In fact, this film is such an oddity, so unconvincing, and, ultimately so irrelevant that it isn't even worthy of Cult Film status. At least in my opinion.