Contemporary setting for a classic that after four hundred and twenty years makes us reflect on human feelings and the tragic consequences of obsessions and ghosts of the mind. «I am not what I am», film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s «Othello», written and directed by Edoardo Leo – in theaters from 14 November for Vision Distribution after the preview in Locarno in 2023 – presents the tragedy of the Moor of Venice, catapulting the characters and their story into the Rome of the early 2000s.
The Roman director and actor, who plays the evil Iago in the story, brings out the relevance of the famous text with respect to the themes inherent to possession, obsessive jealousy and the consequent gender violence, with Jawad Moraqib and Ambrosia Caldarelli as protagonists in the role of Othello and Desdemona, Matteo Olivetti as Cassio (in the film Michele) and Antonia Truppo in the role of Emilia.
In these weeks preceding its release, Leo is meeting university students from all over Italy in a masterclass tour of the film which will stop tomorrow (3.30 pm) in the Aula Magna of the University of Messina. The talk will be moderated by the journalist Natalia La Rosa, and Prof. will intervene with the director. Fabio Rossi (full professor of Italian Linguistics at the university) and the Rector prof. Giovanna Spatari. The cinematographic transposition will also be explored from the point of view of language, and the relationship between literary text and sociological investigation will be highlighted. We talked about it with Edoardo Leo.
«“I am not what I am” was born from a newspaper article from the early 2000s about a husband who killed his wife and then committed suicide – Leo told us – . Finding similarities with the plot of “Othello”, I embarked on this journey towards the making of the film, with the idea of telling through a classic a dramatic contemporary reality, which has increasingly been the protagonist of the news in recent years”.
«Othello» highlights the worst human feelings, such as violence, obsessive jealousy, envy, alongside chauvinism and racism. What could be their representative value? Can the transposition on the screen lead to a sort of education in feeling?
«Films certainly ask the viewer some important questions. In this case, an incredibly toxic dynamic is put on the level of representation, which leads a man to move from a pure love to a jealousy so visceral that it leads to the murder of the woman he loves. My intent was to show how nothing has changed since 1604, precisely by immersing Shakespeare’s words in the contemporary.”
Compared to pathological jealousy, what feeling can be considered its precursor, in the sense of insinuating it as Iago does in the tragedy? Frustration, failure, lack of self-esteem or something else?
«There is a particular mechanism within all the characters, not only in Othello and Iago, but also in Emilia. A kind of double Ego, which becomes ill when it goes out of balance, as Iago is in insinuating certain dynamics into Othello’s head. But it is Othello himself who allows it, he stages evil because he only knows that feeling and cannot keep it at bay. In fact, making Iago the sole culprit of the tragedy risks making him an alibi for Othello. With the film, however, I wanted to amplify the guilt of the executioner. Othello is not a victim of Iago, but of himself; especially today it is not possible to describe the dynamic that triggered Othello’s jealousy by mitigating the protagonist’s guilt.”
The text is represented in its entirety, but with dialogues in Roman dialect and Neapolitan. Why the choice of these two dialects to narrate timeless situations and feelings?
«I made this choice after long studies on most of the Italian translations of the original text since the mid-nineteenth century. I thought that the dialect could restore the poetry of the drama and also certain metaphors and rhetorical figures, together with the profoundly popular violence that is inside “Othello” and most of the Bard’s works. I began to translate the text into Roman dialect, the dialect I know best, with the help of Antonia Truppo for Neapolitan, and it is incredible how the dialect manages to convey certain very elevated literary images of Shakespeare, making them incredibly contemporary.”