When Jessica Yu was offered financing to make a documentary about the ancient Greek playwright Euripides, she pondered the limitations of creating a biography about someone when the source material about his day-to-day life was thin at best. Instead, she came up with the radical idea to make a film about why his work still resonates after more than two millennia. The result is PROTAGONIST, an eerie look at the concordances between the lives of four men who could not, on the surface, be more different. Where Euripides used Greek myths to dissect the human condition, Yu uses the chaos of mythic proportions to be found in the lives of these four men, and uses that to illuminate themes in the plays and make them resonate in new, startling, and intensely visceral ways. In the end, her film tells us more about Euripides’ keen insights and even keener representations of human nature at its most basic than any hard, cold facts about where he might have been born, or what he liked to have for breakfast could have.
Irony plays a large part in all four lives. Each experienced brutality as children, each sought the one simple answer that would let them rise above their pain, the simple solution that would, in the end, only bring them more brutality, pain, and chaos. Hans Klein is the son of a Jewish mother and a Nazi father who subsumed the indifferent brutality of his father into radical politics and ultimately terrorism at its most violent. Joe Loya’s childhood was equally brutal, with a father who took out his rage over the death of his wife by beating his sons without provocation, turning the sweet-tempered, even nurturing boy into a violent armed robber who loved the terror in a teller’s eyes more than the money he took from them. Mark Salzman spent his childhood as the target of school bullies until he discovered an irresistible attraction to the martial arts that would let him feel empowered, which led him to the dojo of a teacher more violent than any school bully. Mark Pierpont grew up gay in a fundamentalist culture that relegated his most fundamental desires to the fires of Hell, forcing him to deny those desires, going so far as to become a preacher himself, spouting the same intolerance.
Yu uses techniques both traditional and groundbreaking to interconnect these lives. Each segment is introduced by one of the terms for the progression of classical plays at the time Euripides was writing, the most familiar of which for contemporary audiences might be catharsis. There are the typical onscreen monologues by each, intercut with family photos, home movies, and news footage. But to recreate the most emotionally intense moments of these men’s lives, she turns to puppets who sport the same masks that actors wore when Euripides’ plays were first performed. The puppets also perform snippets of the plays themselves that reflect the emotional journeys depicted, and in the gloriously mellifluous original Greek. This sounds completely alienating, even ludicrous, but instead, by inserting a proxy, manipulated by the puppeteers with delicate skill, it strips the emotions down to their leanest and meanest and most affecting, leaving no barrier between the narrator and the listener as the tales unfold.
In the end, these four stories become archetypes themselves, and PROTAGONIST does exactly what Euripides intended, affording the audience a cathartic experience while teasing it with questions that may be unanswerable. Why do people fly headlong as willing accomplices into their own personal disasters? What edges out the other in the nature-versus-nurture debate? And why is hubris the most deadly, and most persistent, of all human vices? It is fascinating, troubling, and scathingly brilliant in both concept and execution.
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