Metamorfoses

This movie is an adaptation of the poem written by the Roman poet Ovid. It has gorgeous cinematography and beautiful acting. I like the modern depiction of the gods in the Roman pantheon and their interactions with humans.

The ancients constantly retold myths, telling them in what for them was contemporary setting, and adapting the morals and meaning as well. In fact Ovid changed and moralized a number of Greek myths for his audience. I found this collection to be quite fresh and well done and highly recommend it.

Metamorphosis has a lot of nice earthy action in nature. Greenery is the same to any era, as is sex and human interaction between people young enough to deserve their carnal behavior. The stories of Ovid lend a legitimacy. But Honore adds a very homey French familiarity with the human body and it's activities missing from modern synthetic US cinema. I don't know if the film is really that good or I liked it so much because it has been too many years since my last roll in the hay.

Liberally taking stories from Ovid's epic poem that bears its name, Metamorphoses is a rich and variegated sequence of interconnecting stories, telling of Gods and men, the women they seduce, and their impact in the heavens and on earth.

And it's a pretty fine spectacle. We see Europa (Amira Akili) stolen from the human world by Jupiter (Sébastien Hirel) while Bacchus (Damien Chapelle) cavorts with women and men and animals. There's the unknowable purposes of the Gods at play, we see, juxtaposed against the very real human traits of desire and lust.

It is a fairly explicit film. I feel like a good proportion of screen time has one character or another (and often many) naked or in some state of undress, and there are numerous rather lascivious close ups of genitalia in particular. It all adds to the salacious tone of the film, of course, and further promulgates the films intentions.

As a result, there is indeed something thrillingly exciting and a little titillating about the film even as one is searching for its artistic merit. It's not pornographic by any means, but it does seek to illustrate desire in a way that speaks to the audience kinetically.

In this way, it's actually rather successful, even if it does stand to be a little perplexing. I think if I were to see this film in complete isolation, I'd likely be more harsh on it, but at a film festival, it was a fine piece of programming, and a good entry in a rich selection of films.

In rural France, a hunter encounters a god in the woods. He gets turned into a deer and shot by his fellow hunter. Europa is a teen girl who picks up truck driver Jupiter. He tells her about the time he turned Io into a cow.

This is basically Roman mythology in the modern age. This movie faces many difficulty. Mostly, it is very static. The actors are amateurs. Jupiter should probably be older. He's like a dirty hipster in this. The main plot is rather static and meandering. The recollections only make it even more static in the narrative flow. Then it turns into a convoluted mess. It's hard to follow the characters and the stories. It's a lot of naked people doing who knows what. There is a fluidity in sexuality. That's the only compelling aspect in this movie after the initial Jupiter and Europe encounter. I just stop caring about the plot if there is one. I don't know much about the Greek myths. At least, I could figure out Mother! I don't know what's going on here.