Even in its restored “ultimate cut” version, Tinto Brass’s Caligula
is mostly a joyless one-note slog, its almost three-hour length often feeling
static and repetitive. The film’s signature move sets its main actors against
multi-layered backdrops of eye-filling activity: people juggling, fire-eating,
(very often) copulating or masturbating, or just hanging around with sex organs
exposed, none of this yielding much sense though of circus-like decadence, let
alone of historical engagement or exactitude. Malcolm McDowell easily embodies
the ruler’s perverse, wayward self-righteousness, but his performance is
pitched throughout at the same impervious level, allowing little sense of the
unraveling that causes his downfall. The narrative starts with him in bed with
his sister (Teresa Ann Savoy), proceeds through his murder of the ailing emperor
Tiberius (Peter O’Toole, wearily ranting and made up to look ravaged) and spends
much time on his selection of and apparent increasing co-dependency on a wife
(Helen Mirren, seeming to be exploring a parallel universe in which her career
became mired in Euro-trash). One perks up a bit on a few occasions when the
movie shakes things up, such as in depicting Caligula’s perverse fixation on
the wedding of one of his soldiers, which he disrupts in depraved fashion, or in
the sequence of his would-be invasion of Britain, consisting of traveling a few
miles from Rome and sending hoards of naked men into the water to reap papyrus,
which he then brings back as “proof” of his triumph. Time and again, the movie
pushes its people into strange poses and gestures and interactions, the sum of
which might have cast a mysterious displaced spell if it didn’t all seem so
arbitrary: sometimes one wonders if it would have been happier dispensing with
any pretense of narrative, organizing itself instead as a series of ornate
fragments. At other times, studying the dutifully but mostly unexcitingly staged
creations, I started thinking about Peter Greenaway might have done with all
this (and without even cutting back on the nudity…)
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