Medea

Jason set out in his ship, the Argo, to find the Golden Fleece. This began one of the world’s immortal tales about a loving couple who inflict incalculable suffering on one another when their love turns to hatred. Jason received the help of the beautiful princess and sorceress Medea, who killed her own brothers to help him escape. Later, when the couple had returned to Jason’s Greece as refugees, he betrayed her, wanting to marry a younger woman Glauce, daughter of King Creon. This i where Euripides’ tragedy begins – as does Lars von Trier’s TV film, a personal interpretation of the classic play. Lars von Trier has based his film on a script by the grand old man of Danish cinema Carl Th. Dreyer and the poet-priest Preben Thomsen ( Dreyer was never able to realize his dream of a “Medea” with Maria Callas). Von Trier has transferred the story from ancient Greece to the Nordic Dark Ages and set it in the swamps of the Danish west coast. But the tale of Medea’s terrible vengeance is the same. She fights for her children and herself, but in the end she is driven to murder Glauce and King Creon, and then those whom Jason loves above all others: her and Jason’s children. As in his debut film “The Element of Crime” (1984), von Trier uses untraditional, sometimes highly artificial, lighting and color in “Medea”. “Medea” was received with coldness or direct hostility by most of the reviewers in the newspapers. Then the film critics and film makers protested against what one of them called “the reviewers’ murder of Medea” – here, at last, a TV-production told its story in pictures. Something of a new for, perhaps: neither film nor TV...