Country:
Spain
Recognizables Faces:
Rachel Weisz
Directed By:
Alejandro Amenabar
There's a tremendous buzz around Alejandro Amenabar. Every time he releases a movie, people in theaters all over the world go sit in awe and watch "that repertoire director" whose only claim to "repertoireness" is to be born in Spain. He shocked the cinema community with Tesis in 1996, a movie which made the bold claim that violence is BAD, bit the dust with The Others and struck a nerve with 2004's The Sea Inside where his subject and his smart use of Javier Bardem overshadowed the movie in itself. I don't dislike Amenabar, but I don't get in the he's-all-that hype either.
Agora is a Historical Drama that takes place in Alexandria, before the dirty Christians burned the place down. Rachel Weisz plays the role of Hypatia, a mythic philosopher that supposedly understood the solar system a long time before Kepler, Copernic and Galileo did. Which would make them chumps. BUT, the library burned down remember? So the assumed chumpness of those three astonomers is all conjectures. So Hypatia is very well respected in her Pagan community, teaching to many men about philosophy, physics and all that. It's all gravy until Saint-Cyril comes into town and causes a Christian uprising. In Agora, the Christians are represented by barbaric, bearded men wearing turban and quoting from the book. Yeah I know, kind of like Talibans right?
Here's where I get confused with religious statements and cinema. Mel Gibson, in his Passion Of Christ represent the Jewish people as the obscurantist assholes that refused the message of love and enlightment. Then, a movie like Osama points the fingers to Muslims for stuffing female rights and being obscurantist assholes in general. Then, Agora claims the Christians are responsible for both of these problems. Now, who's telling the truth? We know there are still some Muslim stonings in Somalia (here's GRAPHIC evidence), Jewish Israelites are still engaged in high scale violence (against their will or not, we don't know), but now the Christians too? Not the brainwashed Born-Again of Dubya, but the founding fathers? Man, shopping for beliefs is harder than shopping for a house nowadays.
In order to keep your sanity, you have to take Amenabar's movie as a blunt statement against religion in general. And its stripping the movie of almost all his power. Amenabar is a specialist in crafting very complex scenes around simplistic concepts. Dogma followers persecutes free thinkers. Who would have known? We're just a century passed the scientific revolution and three past humanism. Amenabar's point is toroughly confused, but it's a quite entertaining confusion. It doesn't back off from what it's trying to say, it's just affirming something so vague and trendy, it's hard to discern.
Another thing that annoys me about Agora is the aesthetic. There's this taboo in movie that you can't reproach a director making a Historical Epic. The aesthetic of demesure and grandeur and the puckered up fake british accent seems to somehow buy credibility. Was Alexandria that neat,easy and enlightened before the dirty Christians pillaged it like bloodthirsty vikings? Probably not, but I'm not going to reproach Amenabar to stand his ground here. Only to fall in the trap of Historical epics. Most movies do. Some tiptoed across it like John McTiernan's adaptation of Michael Chricton's 13th Warrior, but airbrushed beauty and grandeur is usually the norm.
Agora won't change the way anybody sees cinema. Hell, there's only one scene I found beautiful (and it's a spoiler, sorry), but it's fun as hell to debate. Alejandro Amenabar crafted a piece of work that's more interesting because it failed than because it achieved. Sometimes a punching bag feels better than a Boticelli.
SCORE: 70%
