Among the latest films I managed to watch on satellite TV, two adaptations of literary works: a play by William Shakespeare,
Coriolanus, directed and interpreted by Ralph Fiennes, and
Two Mothers, based on a novella by Doris Lessing.
Fiennes's Coriolanus is not set in ancient Rome since it it a modernization of the Elizabethan play. Warfare characterizes the dark, bloody story of Caius Marcus Coriolanus in this movie, too. A great cast, including Vanessa Redgrave, Gerald Butler, Brian Cox, Jessica Chastain and James Nesbitt, give life to the protagonists of this political historical play, who are really difficult to find appealing, but who are, anyway, complex and interesting, flawed and out of time.
Coriolanus is a war hero, a strong leader, a patrician who despises the plebeians, a powerful man who is arrogant, impulsive, stubborn, incapable of diplomacy or mediation, except when he accepts to be allied with his worst enemy, Aufidius, when it comes to take revenge against his own citizens who had exiled him. He is ready to march on Rome and destroy it at Aufidius's side since he is blinded by his own rage, his furious, violent desire for revenge. Coriolanus is not a great Roman leader embodying great virtues, but a boastful politician who too easily becomes the victim of other plotting, scheming, and not even smart - politicians. Is he capable of love? He is incapable of denying anything to his own mother, if that can count as filial love. To me, it sounds more like a never totally overcome aedipus complex. Strongwilled mother bends weakwilled son and, in the end, even succeeds in undermining his convictions, making him the victim of those other politicians, the ones he had entrusted of his own plan to destroy Rome: the leaders of the Volsci. When they see his undecisiveness in the attack to Rome, though they got their profits from the final peace treaty, they decide to kill him.
