Taviani Brothers

Caesar Must Die

a pressure-cooker environment and we begin to lose sight of what is real. Picking up the Golden Bear at 2012’s Berlinale, Caesar MustDie is the kind of sucker-punch filmmaking you don’t expect to see with two octogenarians at the helm. Aggression, betrayal and guilt: the arena is familiar territory for these men, many of whom have come from Mafia or Camorra roots. These crime families are rife with masculine posturing, power battles and metaphorical and physical backstabbing. They’ve seen it all before, and the story they perform skims close to the bone.

In the Taviani brothers’ latest offering, a group of Italian convicts, many serving life sentences, stage a performance of Julius Caesar in Rome’s high security Rebibbia prison. With fiction captured almost as documentary, performance blurs with real life in

Words ByAvalon Lyndon

‘the kind of raw, palpable talent that takes your

breath away’

‘the kind of raw, palpable talent that takes your

Caesar Must Die is worth seeing for its memorable audition scene alone. Most of the film’s characters are real Rebibbia inmates; main man Salvatore Striano is an ex-inmate of the prison, returning to its walls for the film’s shoot. With footage taken from the real auditions, we watch each man state his name and birthplace, before performing two scenes. Both share the same

lines, but the scenes are performed first with sadness, then with anger. It’s an incredibly simple concept which seems to capture the essence of every man’s character. Shot in super high-definition stark black and white, the lighting shows up every straggled hair, creviced wrinkle or deep scar. It’s an arresting sequence, seesawing across the emotion spectrum and

mixing shonky am-dram with the kind of raw, palpable talent that takes your breath away. Sadly, the rest of the film isnever able to live up to this stormer of an opening, and the powerful moment when the men finally return to the loneliness and isolation of their cells is let down by a moment of over-exposition from one of the inmates. “Since I have discovered

art, this cell has turned into a prison,” he laments. When we’ve just witnessed the final flurry of fury, pride and passion erupt betweenthe prison’s cold cement walls, that goes without saying.

Caesar Must Die is in UK cinemas now