Chilean director Alejandro Amenabar does not make films that fit neatly into any particular genre; he is a master at unsettling audiences’ expectations. Agora, which opens today, is no exception, morphing from a sword and scandals romance into an exploration of faith, reason and the fragility of civilized values.
Amenabar’s atmospheric The Others (2001) carefully upended the conventions of the haunted-house movie with a thoughtful appreciation of how perceptions and expectation can create a sense of dread far more intense than jack-in-the-box apparitions and buckets of ectoplasm or gore. This was followed by The Sea Inside (2004), a film about a quadriplegic’s nearly three decade fight for the right to die. The film was mainly about the thoughts of the central character and the nexus between life, death and the spirit world.
With Agora, the director revisits these themes in the unexpected guise of a costume drama set in late 4th-century Roman-occupied Egypt. The historical background is the rise of Christianity and the retreat of paganism, and the film develops into something that comes close to a diatribe against Christian faith and a paean of praise for the scientific spirit, as represented by the various schools of Greek philosophers.
Photo courtesy of CatchPlay
This conflict is enacted through the life of Hypatia, an historical if shadowy figure who was remarkable for being one of very few women to achieve distinction as a cosmological theorist and philosopher. She is played by the equally remarkable actress Rachel Weisz, whose presence is the only thing that holds this rambling mix of simplistic history and barroom polemic together.
The story opens with Hypatia teaching a roomful of young students, three of whom are more than uncommonly enamored of their beautiful science teacher. There is Orestes (Oscar Isaac), a young nobleman who is not shy of making his feelings public, Synesius (Rupert Evans), a young Christian who eventually puts aside his scientific studies for advancement in the church, and Davus (Max Minghella), a slave in Hypatia’s household who has scientific talent.
Weisz does an excellent job in portraying a beautiful woman uninterested in her own beauty, even as it is abundantly evident why the men around her are unable to resist her charms. Unfortunately, while Isaac and Minghella work overtime to portray their ardor, it never gets beyond lugubrious languishings. The lack of any real chemistry within the student/teacher relationship weakens Agora, giving it a loose, episodic structure that simply struggles to put the building blocks of the story into place.
This is a pity, for Agora is full of ideas and has a good stab at portraying the excitement and confusion of early astronomers in their efforts to bring into harmony their theories of mathematics and the motion of the stars. This sense of scientific exhilaration is pitted against the non-rational faith behind the ambitious Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria’s growing political power. The Christians are portrayed very much as the villains of the story, though Amenabar is careful to show that pagans and Jews were equally prone to committing atrocities.
The historical Cyril, while actively persecuting non-Christians, was perfectly happy to act violently against Christians who stood in the way of his ambition, but for all that, Amenabar’s portrayal of a man who was numbered among the great doctors of the church and subsequently canonized as little better than a thug diminishes the complexity of the political battle between the church, the nominally Christian administration, and the interests of various religious groups.
Against such a weakly realized background, Weisz is able to endow her character with considerable depth, first as a woman who rejects the standard feminine roles of her time, and then as a rationalist who sees all she holds most dear being swept up in the ecstasy of religious faith.
Her former students and former suitors abandon her ideas in favor of advancement within the emerging political or religious establishments, even if they don’t altogether abandon her as a woman. This in some ways is the ironic twist that provides a glimpse of the complex ideas that Amenabar is trying to express about the fragility of scientific achievement against the more histrionic appeal of the emotions.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby