A Movie You Might Have Missed #51: Caesar Must Die (2012, Italian)

It's been 11 years since I began this series highlighting movies I wished more people knew about. I'm rerunning it from the beginning because I still think these are movies you might have missed.

"To think, at school I found this so boring."

Convicts in an Italian high security prison practice and perform Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. In the process, we see how the play holds up as a real life reflection of not only the prisoners' experiences but of life in general. The prison theater is being redone so practices are held all over the prison which not only gets us out of the "stage performance" aspect but connects the play more fully to the prisoners' reality.

It was sheer genius for the directors to use real prisoners as the actors while filming in the real prison. Most of them are simply fantastic. Everything except the actual performance is in black and white which, as shot here, adds a rich textural depth.

I didn't expect the film to take us through the substance of the play but that was all to the good also. I'm not likely to voluntarily watch Julius Caesar but I thoroughly enjoyed recognizing key scenes and realizing I knew more of it than I thought. I also was fascinated to realize that the Italian translation was much more colloquial than most Shakespeare we native English speakers ever hear. That also made it easier to connect with in the prison setting.

I've seen people kicking this movie because it doesn't measure up to their standards of a documentary. I think that one can't really bring the documentary label to bear on it because it is an interesting hybrid of staged fiction and documentary.

Simply judging it on its own merits, as a piece of art, as a movie, as a story, as entertainment, Caesar Must Die is terrific.