HER BROTHER’S KEEPER
CLASSIC TALE OF ANTIGONE GETS FORCEFUL MODERN REMIX
Antigone
Sophocles’s tragedy about civic versus familial duty gets an aggressively modern facelift in Sophie Deraspe’s Antigone, a Québécois remixing of the play that will be Canada’s first entrant into the sweepstakes for the new best international film Oscar. Newcomer Nahéma Ricci gives a steely, star- making performance as the eponymous heroine, who defies the state in defence of her family.
Deraspe’s version of the classical story bends Sophocles’s vision to encompass police brutality and the refugee experience in contemporary Montreal.
A strong student, Antigone’s life is thrown into disarray when her brother Polynice (Rawad El-zein), is charged with resisting arrest during a drug bust where police fatally shoot their older brother Étéocle ( Hakim Brahimi). Protesting the government’s plans to deport her surviving brother, Antigone cuts her hair and smuggles herself into his cell to take his place. She becomes a folk hero, her image circulated in posters and memes.
Deraspe refashions Antigone as a Joan of Arc figure following her gender- swapping prison stunt. It’s a convincing analogy, given Antigone’s saintlike resolve, and her commitment to a form of justice that’s seemingly more enlightened than the state’s arbitrary shakedown of her siblings and grandmother, and other racialized immigrant families. Deraspe is wise to stay attuned to recent youth-driven protest movements, recalling the March for Our Lives and Black Lives Matter, and prefiguring the climate strike, by emphasizing the visual contrast between Antigone’s austerity of spirit and colourful red sweaters and tracksuits.
These contemporary resonances largely keep the dust off a historically distanced text, animating it as political theatre rather than rendering it the stuff of Wikipedia explainers. Yet there are moments when Deraspe’s reach exceeds her grasp. Although there is a certain structural chutzpah and audiovisual variety afforded by ceding so much of the screen time to montages of Antigone’s family entering the meme- sphere, there is a professional polish to those sequences that runs counter to the anarchic and organic spirit of the youth culture being portrayed.
That one of those montages, where Étéocle’s friends mourn him through tributes on unnamed social media platforms, is set to a song about police violence against black men by Black Montreal hip- hop artist Nate Husser exacerbates Deraspe’s tendency to collapse differences to speak in a universal register. The film is also curiously mum on the ins and outs of this specific family’s refugee experience in Canada, using Antigone’s drama as a universal signpost for the immigrant experience. It avoids questions that might arise about the family’s model minority status, given their academic achievements, light skin and movie-star looks.
The film’s message occurs most forcefully in the quiet and unassuming moments when Ricci channels her character’s raw power in closeups, and is allowed to be a teen prematurely aged into the role of her family’s sole protector and advocate against an unmoved state. ★★★ Antigone opens in Toronto
and Vancouver Dec. 6.