With Caesar Must Die, which opens Friday at Music Box, Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani embrace the two primary influences on their six-decade career: classic literature and Italian neorealist cinema. The film was shot at a maximum-security prison in Rome as inmates rehearsed a production of Julius Caesar. The U.S. documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars (2005) also recorded a prison staging of Shakespeare, but rather than show how the production impacts the prisoners’ lives, as that movie did, the Tavianis focus on the play itself, assembling an abridged version of the show from months of rehearsal footage. The Tavianis regard the prisoners as human beings, not criminals or cogs in the penal system, and their sympathetic portraits show the direct influence of neorealist filmmakers like Vittorio De Sica, who famously cast poor and otherwise marginalized citizens in his dramas. Yet the Tavianis’ ultimate goal here is to bring a sense of immediacy to Shakespeare and, in so doing, consider why his work endures.
Characteristically, the Tavianis seem interested in the prisoners of Caesar Must Die for the timeless qualities they evoke. The film begins with the final scene of the prisoners’ public performance, but its first major sequence, which colors the rest of the film, flashes back to six months before the show, as the play was being cast. Theater director Fabio Cavalli asks each auditioning prisoner to state his name, birthplace, and other pertinent information—first tearfully, then angrily. The Tavianis cut between a dozen such displays, the prisoners emoting in front of a blank wall. Seeing these men respond to the same prompt leads one to consider what makes each distinct. One notes physical differences as well as shared behavioral traits; every prisoner seems vulnerable beneath his tough demeanor.
