FIFTH COLUMN

If you are nostalgic for the gods, go and see The First King, a great film about Romulus, Remus and the birth of Rome under divine fire. Usually if you go to the cinema to see a historical film, you find the usual refrain: the past is adapted to today, updated and ideological, they speak of Aeneas as an illegal migrant, Spartacus as a Landini of antiquity, history is reviewed with the smallest meter of the present: see budding feminists, liberated homosexuals, unionized slaves and always good and generous blacks. Evil is represented as the fascism of the ancients, the enemy is a Nazi ante litteram.
If instead you think that ancient history should be represented in all its glorious and bloody distance from the present, The First King is the masterpiece you've been waiting for. Cinema is the workshop of myth in our times and the First King expresses it fully, without sugarcoating the harshness of the past. In the film you can already feel the respect for the almost three thousand years that separate us from the time in which the Eternal City was founded in the choice of the Proto-Latin language. The presence of the sacred, of the elementary forces of nature, the impetuosity of the primary bonds for life and death, the strength of command and the fear of God, the ritual importance of sacrifice, of blood and fire, submission to the verdicts of fate, the aura and the mystery, they are the horizon in which this extraordinary representation of brotherly love develops, very powerful, which turns into fratricide by divine will.
I didn't know Matteo Rovere, the director, nor the protagonists of the film Alessio Lapice and Alessandro Borghi. It's a great, dry film, of rare power, even if raw and bloody. But those who dismiss the film as a show for muscular "males"., lovers of war and violence, it does not capture the tragic intensity of the story in the shadow of the sacred. The film is not a Manichean depiction of good guys versus bad guys, it doesn't sound like ours are arriving, it doesn't celebrate muscles, powerful arms, blood and pierced bodies. The film narrates the tragedy of the human condition in relation to the divine and history.
Remo, as well as a valiant and intrepid fighter, he loves his brother, protects him, defends him in defiance of death, takes him to safety. He is king in pectore and there is a total bond between them. Until the priestess is called to read the future in the entrails of animals, according to the art of soothsayers, reveals the fratricidal destiny prescribed by the gods, to found the city and proclaim himself king.
Remo refuses the verdict, rejects the will of the gods, he says – like a man in the throes of hubris, to titanic fury – “I am my destiny”, he sets fire to the huts to assert his royal power and challenge the gods, he condemns the priestess to death for her nefarious prophecy. There is no pride in Remo, there is the refusal to kill his twin brother, the person dearest to him in the world. This is the absolute tragedy.
The opposite will happen Romulus, who loved his brother with the same intense love, but he does not shy away from the divine verdict, albeit terrible. The tremendous and fascinating sacredness of the ancients. Romulus rekindles the sacred fire that his brother had tried to put out and his sovereignty is born around that fire, delimits the limen, the sacred border and the inviolable threshold on which Rome will rise. Boundary that Remo transgresses, until the final fight between the two brothers, the killing of Remus and Romulus' despair in front of the lifeless body of his brother. A classic tragedy, from which the eternal and sacred city will be born, Roma.
Who does not grasp the tragic and powerful sense of the sacred, the irruption of the divine into history, the indissoluble connection between heroism and amor fati, between ardor and fear; and who does not grasp the profound love of two brothers in all its intensity, the extreme pain of killing the brother, he doesn't understand the meaning of the story. Brotherhood without father (e mater) turns into fratricide.
Who believes that that either/or demonstrates the cruelty of the pagan gods and the warrior and ruthless nature of the Romans, he does not have in mind the cruel pages of the Bible and other sacred books of antiquity, the sacrifice of Isaac imposed on his father Abraham, despite being stopped at the last minute and transfigured into a sacrificial goat. It is the world of the ancients, politeisti or monotheisti, their vision of the sacred, absolute obedience to God, to the point of denying oneself and those closest to you.
The real question that remains and which affects us as moderns, fragile contemporaries, passed from the age of iron to the age of flint and from the age of faith to the age of nothingness, of the self and of unbelief, it is whether the sacred is possible without violence, the sacred without sacrifice. That is, if it is possible to go towards the divine not through pain, sparing us the cross - we would say as children of Christian civilization. Terrible question but one that expresses all our humanity.
And question not only in the sense of interrogation but also in the sense of invocation, of prayer. May the divine spirit descend upon us but not ask us to spread pain and bear witness with suffering. We don't want to suffer, we don't want to make people suffer.
This is the clemency we ask from fate and the gods. But it's already a miracle that these questions occur to you when leaving a cinema, from the room where they screened a film, among the remains of cans and popcorn, while the smartphones start chirping again.
MV, The Truth 3 February 2019

SOURCE – http://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/ama-dio-piu-di-tuo-fratello/