Alucinação de Ulisses

Having finished James Joyce's monumental masterpiece "Ulysses" at about two in the morning last night, I decided to reward myself today by finally viewing Joseph Strick's critically acclaimed adaptation of the work. I was highly interested in seeing how certain mindbogglingly difficult and seemingly unfilmable sections from the novel were portrayed by his lens, and I was left impressed and entertained. While a truly proper adaptation of Joyce's massive literary landmark would be about twelve times the length of this experiment, Strick's "Ulysses" is a fine and almost flawless attempt at condensing and adapting the perplexing classic to the big screen. The performers chosen are all excellent, both visually and performance-wise the actors embody what one's mind likely interpreted the iconic characters whilst reading the original work.

Although I seem to be solely using this review to be comparing the film to the book, I should also point out that even if the novel never existed, this would be among the greatest movies of its kind. This is an avant garde journey through the streets of Dublin that is crafted brilliantly on all cinematic fronts. The many beautiful locations are shot with lovely black and white cinematography, (as I already mentioned) the performances are fantastic, the editing is noticeably well done, and the final product has the ability to be both a companion to Joyce's novel and a wonderful work of art in its own right. Here, you will find much to love, and the two hour running time flies by. Seriously, this film feels much faster than two hours, similarly to how the original novel felt much shorter than 700 pages (at least in my opinion anyway, since many others loathe the book and find it tedious and WAY overlong).

Joyce's prose seems necessary to be heard rather than just read, and the final segment, this being Molly Bloom's beautiful (and dirty) soliloquy, masters the challenge of reading the master's work aloud. It is read with grace, passion, and character in a way that conveys all of the humor and pain and extreme sexual desire hidden within Joyce's many pages of inner monologue. This is a (or perhaps THE) masterpiece of the little-practiced genre of "stream of consciousness filmmaking".

Could Ulysses be filmed? A tremendous novel becomes an atmospheric, entertaining, and generally absorbing film, losing none of the humour or the pathos. Perhaps a little slowly paced to start with, but filming around Dublin in black and white with an interesting cast and a variety of interesting approaches means the film is well worth seeing. Much better than expected.

As if the film were not of value in itself, this is an excellent way to get an overview of the novel as a preface to reading it. In the summer of 1968 I saw the film in NYC; that fall in graduate school, I read the book for the first time. Some of the pleasure in reading the novel was my memory of the scrupulously detailed film. And for better or worse--and I've now read and taught the novel for over three decades--Milo O'Shea is still Leopold Bloom.

Having enjoyed Joyce's complex novel so keenly I was prepared to be disappointed by Joseph Strick's and Fred Haines's screenplay, given the fabulous complexity of the original text. However, the film turned out to be very well done and a fine translation of the tone, naturalism, and levity of the book.

It certainly helps to have read the original text before viewing the film. I imagine the latter would seem disjointed, with very odd episodes apparently randomly stitched together, without a prior reading of the text to help grasp the plot.

It's amazing to see how "filthy" the film is, given that it was shot in Dublin in 1967. The Irish film censors only, finally, unbanned it for viewing by general audiences in Ireland as late as 2000 (it was shown to restricted audiences in a private cinema club, the Irish Film Theatre, in the late 1970s). Joyce's eroticism is not simply naturalistic and raunchy, it offers many wildly "perverse" episodes. Never mind that so many of these fetishes were unacceptable when the book was published in 1922 - they were still utterly taboo when the film was made in 1967.

It is astonishing and heartening to watch the cream of the Irish acting profession of the 1960s, respected players all, daring to utter and enact Joyce's hugely transgressive text with such gusto.

Bravo!

The one utterly 'unfilmable' novel was indeed filmed, and with a fair degree of success, by Joseph Strick in 1967. "Ulysses" is set over the course of one day, June 16th, 1904 in Dublin, now celebrated annually as 'Bloomsday' in deference to the book's central character, Leopold Bloom but Strick chose to update it to the time the film was made perhaps on the basis that the novel itself is 'timeless' or maybe on the basis that the events depicted could have happened at any time. It charts a journey through Dublin by Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, the young teacher and hero of Joyce's more accessible "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".

It is, of course, the book that sits on the shelves of the intelligensia, mostly unread, but essential to show off; the stream of consciousness novel to end them all. On the other hand, it may have gone unread for years as it was originally banned in most countries on the grounds of obscenity. That the film works at all is a great credit to Strick but mostly the critics didn't go for it feeling, perhaps, that the director over-simplified it, changing the text and that the updating was tantamount to sacrilige. He also chose to shoot it in widescreen when the material may have cried out for something more intimate but it is superbly shot by Wolfgang Suschitzky while the cast are mostly splendid. Milo O'Shea is a superb Bloom and Barbara Jefford is outstanding as his wife, Molly while the Dublin locations now add up to a great time capsule of what life was like there in the mid-sixties.