Menandros & Thaïs
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Menandros & Thaïs |
| Country of production | Czech Republic , Austria |
| original language | Czech , German , Finnish |
| Publishing year | 2016 |
| length | 129 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Antonín Šilar , Ondřej Cikán |
| script | Ondřej Cikán, Anatol Vitouch |
| production |
The group , Anna Tydlitátová |
| music | Hans Wagner |
| camera | Šimon Dvořáček |
| cut | Zuzana Walter |
| occupation | |
| |
Menandros & Thaïs is a surrealistic, low-budget sandal film directed by Antonín Šilar and Ondřej Cikán , which premiered at the 23rd IFF Febiofest in Prague . The film is based on the novel of the same name by Ondřej Cikán, which in turn is inspired by the ancient Greek love and adventure novels .
The cinema release in the Czech Republic took place on April 28, 2016, the Austrian premiere on June 2, 2016; the German premiere on March 18, 2017. The film has been online since the end of 2017.
action
Thaïs is kidnapped by pirates from Athens during her wedding to Menandros . The groom and his loyal servant Eudromos embark on a desperate search through much of the ancient world and gradually transforms into a bloodthirsty monster. While he subjugates Scythian peoples and then even goes to war against the Persian great king Xerxes , Thaïs is enslaved and passed on from owner to owner, whereby her extraordinary beauty always protects her from the greatest suffering. Menandro's childhood sweetheart, the hetaera Chryseïs, chases after the hero and lets a witch help her. In a prophecy Menandros learns from the mouth of his late father-in-law Aristoboulos that a happy reunion with Thaïs would plunge the lovers into the greatest misfortune. Chryseïs and the witch planned everything carefully.
Image and sound aesthetics of the film
Neither Antonín Šilar nor Ondřej Cikán are full-time directors. Šilar is a set designer in Prague, Cikán is a writer and Graecist in Vienna. The aesthetics of the film are accordingly in order . Menandros & Thaïs is based on composed, partly theatrical settings, while the plot is driven by poetic monologues . A certain tempo is kept by frequent changes of location, stylized fight scenes and the music by Hans Wagner reminiscent of spaghetti westerns .
Just like the novel, the film is set in the fifth century BC between the two Persian Wars . Xerxes says towards the end of the film that he must conquer Athens. Both the novel and the film mix the ancient world with our present, but in slightly different ways. While the illusion of the ancient surroundings in the novel is preserved over long stretches despite all the absurd descriptions, the protagonists of the film move in historically obviously incorrect theater costumes in stylized locations of today's Central Europe. The ancient surroundings are only hinted at in the picture. In the sound, however, the illusion remains: When Menandros and Eudromos leave Athens, Menandros describes the “proud trireme ” they climbed from the off . In the picture, the heroes are sitting on a pontoon , which, accompanied by pompous music, passes a slowly opening lock gate .
Another surrealistic feature of the film is its multilingualism. Half of the protagonists speak Czech, the other half German, the pirate Polyploos speaks Finnish. The language distribution takes no account of people's nationality and everyone understands each other as if they were speaking only one language. The original version has Czech and German subtitles.
Some differences from the novel
- Menandros does not go into the final battle on a ship carried by winged horses, but on a tank.
- The role of the narrator only becomes clear in the film when he meets Menandros on the train to Gmunden.
- The episode with the sorceresses who turn most of Menandro's men into women is missing in the film.
- The episode about the Thaïs stay in the dwarf city is missing in the film.
- The couple, who recorded Menandros and Eudromos on the coast of Asia Minor , have been replaced by three old women in the film.
- In the film, the witch does magic using a television set.
- The film's opening and closing song is based on the poem 94D by Sappho .
- The tune the dwarf hums is the ode to Nemesis by Mesomedes .
- The poem that the witch recited in ancient Greek in the last battle comes from Idyll No. 2 by Theocritus .
- Most of the spoken texts in the film are only slightly abbreviated from the novel.
Trivia
The film was shot between 2012 and 2014 without official funding in the Czech Republic and Austria, but received funding from the Czech Cinematography Fund towards the end of the shooting. Over 300 volunteers have worked without pay, with a large number of them becoming co-owners.
Reception and criticism
The Czech trailer was the most watched film trailer on the idnes.cz server between January and March 2016. The cinema distribution was comparatively successful for a low-budget film with over 110 cinema projections worldwide, mostly in the Czech Republic and Austria. The film was positively received by the Austrian critics, in the Czech Republic the positive reception predominated, but there were also negative voices. Menandros & Thaïs has been compared to Jodorowsky's The Mountain , David Lynch and Luis Buñuel . The film received the award of the Czech Association of Directors and Screenwriters ARAS.
Web links
- Official site with German and Czech trailers as well as links to the soundtrack and the online versions
- Soundtrack
- Menander & Thaïs in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Febiofest ( Memento of the original from April 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Angelo Algieri: Roman review. dated September 7, 2011.
- ↑ Links to the Czech-German and the English version
- ↑ Isabelle Daniel: Article. Da Hog'n, April 6, 2016.
- ↑ German press release
- ↑ cf. Credits
- ↑ cf. Credits
- ↑ cf. Credits and soundtrack
- ↑ Trivia on IMDb
- ↑ idnes.cz
- ↑ List of all projections on the official website.
- ↑ At least no negative reviews in German can be found. In addition to the reviews that are mentioned in the following notes, the following are worth mentioning: Alexandra Seibel: Critique in Kurier, June 14, 2016, p. 32 and Dominik Kamalzadeh: Critique in Der Standard, June 3, 2016, print 4. / 5.6. 2016, p. 30 as well as criticism on orf.at from June 2, 2016.
- ↑ A selection of reviews is: Kateřina Nechvílová: Criticism ( Memento of the original from June 12, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in Literární noviny, May 10, 2016 and Martin Brys: Critique in cervenykoberec.cz, April 24, 2016. A negative review from the Czech Republic is Mirka Spáčilová: Critique in iDnes.cz, April 24, 2016.
- ↑ Josef Zorn: Review in Vice.com/alps, March 18, 2016
- ↑ Pia Reiser: Review in FM4 on June 2, 2016
- ↑ Petr Stránský: Review in Cinema CZ, No. 301, 05/2016, pp. 30–31 (A translation of the review into German can also be found under the link.)
- ↑ ARAS ( Memento of the original from April 18, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
