BERLIN, Feb 20 (Reuters) – Is it higher, when requested to serve a tyrant, to enter the inside circles and attempt to reasonable his whims, or to face apart, revelling in your integrity as his rages eat the world?
“Seneca – On the Creation of Earthquakes” seeks a solution to this query, each very up to date and everlasting, within the final evening of the first-century Roman thinker’s life, after he learns the Emperor Nero has ordered his loss of life.
“All these dilemmas, political, private, philosophical would come to a head in a single evening and that might finish together with his loss of life,” director Robert Schwentke mentioned of his movie, which premieres on the Berlin Movie Pageant on Monday.
The movie, shot in Morocco on minimalist, theatrical units, has little sympathy for its principal character, performed by John Malkovich as a person of a glibness so whole that not even his impending loss of life can cease the torrent of pat knowledge from his mouth.
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“He talks so much,” mentioned Malkovich. “And typically it was laborious to not assume, OK, however die and, you realize, be quiet.”
Nero, performed by Tom Xander, is callous and childlike, prepared to kill or humiliate anybody who would constrain him. He quickly activates Seneca, tiring of his minimally moderating affect.
“There was lots of alternative to attract on present occasions and affect my efficiency,” mentioned Xander.
Seneca’s monstrousness is extra understated. He asks his younger spouse, performed by an ethereal Lilith Stangenberg, to die with him to lend theatrical weight to his loss of life and his dictums.
“He was extra of a life coach. You already know, he would have a TV present right now,” mentioned Schwentke, who studied philosophy in Germany earlier than leaving to check movie in the USA in 1989.
Seneca’s cold pomposity makes his finish hilarious, even pleasurable, to observe. However Geraldine Chaplin, who performs a Roman aristocrat, drew on her father Charlie Chaplin’s experiences to warn there have been limits to what humour may accomplish.
“My father made ‘The Nice Dictator,’ I suppose, 70 years in the past,” she mentioned, referring to the 1940 anti-war satire that lampooned Hitler and Mussolini.
“And he thought that might change the world. And it solely made folks snort. … And this movie could be very humorous.”
Reporting by Thomas Escritt; modifying by Jonathan Oatis
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