MÉTAMORPHOSES

released OUt NOW! 15 | 102 minutes

Director christophe Honoré Cast amira akili, sébastien Hirel, damien chapelle, Mélodie richard

Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses is 15 volumes long, and takes in more than 250 individual myths. It would be impossible for one film to dramatise the epic in its entirety.

Instead, Christophe Honoré hones in on Europe (Amira Akili), a young woman who encounters a succession of deities, from libidinous Jupiter to the menacing Bacchus and finally Orphée. They proceed to regale her with tales of humans turned into animals; the dreadful story of the Minas sisters, kidnapped and tormented because they refused to believe in the gods; of the murder of 100-eyed Argus, and more.

Playing out in present-day France, with a cast made up of largely first-time actors, Honoré’s film is a bizarre and occasionally uncomfortable magic realist spectacle. The gods are capricious, cruel and frequently misogynistic. But while Métamorphoses provocatively pushes the limits of its 15 certificate (this is a film where a dying old couple are transformed into a pair of trees, which Europa promptly has sex on – and that’s one of the tender moments…), it never feels leery.

Comparisons to the works of Pasolini are apt – there’s beauty as well as barbarity here, as the ancient world returns to life in the woods, scrublands, roadsides and lakes around Nîmes. Will Salmon