Macbeth, Joel Coen, 2023

“No art teaches us to discover the construction of the mind in the face”, wrote Shakespeare because he had not yet known cinema, a certain type of cinema, nor would he have ever imagined the power of translating his scans into words of the soul into images human, of films like Joel Coen's Macbeth.

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Desire, ambition, deception, appearance, 'the daggers hidden in smiles' everything speaks of a lust for power that triggers a spiral of violence and revenge, which kills sleep and leaves no room for the day. The darkest hour stretches out until destiny completes its full circle and everything that is announced at the beginning of the story by three witches/sisters/demons/ghosts with the zoomorphic features of ravens echoes throughout the story to come to fruition, in the last act, tragically and ineluctably.

The head and crown of a king fall, mocked by a destiny that plays with human actions and places him on a sterile throne, only to ferry a kingdom from one bloodline to another that is not his.

In the haze of days stunned by the noise of battle and long nights in which lost sleep gives way to visions with open eyes, deceptive hallucinations and creations of the mind, even the prophecies speak a cryptic and otherworldly language that mortal and greedy man he is unable to decode and remains a victim of it, because, come what may, so it is said, so it is written and so it is.

Joel Coen translates to a subsequent level, in a purely visual language and in a metaphysical dimension, all of William Shakespeare's complex, meticulous and highly refined narration of the logic of power and the feverish, unconscious and unaware mechanisms of the human mind, when it moves and she comes alive driven by an obsession and a desire that can find no other outlet than in the dead-end street of damnation. Macbeth's battle is not with an enemy outside himself but with an enemy inside himself as a man divided between the ardor of ambition and the honesty of action, two approaches that do not coincide but collide. Here then, as in all tragedies, the ending is already written in the prologue and the sunset is already in the dawn of that tomorrow, of that tomorrow which advances little by little, day after day, towards the last syllable of the script and life is but a walking shadow'.

And precisely in the balance of white, black, shadows, lights, geometries, symmetries, static and sharpness of the forms, Bruno Delbonnel's photography proposes and rereads the dreamlike atmospheres of De Chirico, emulsifying them with the influences of Ingmar Bergman's Swedish cinema, to arrive at a representation of reality which, appearing still and suspended, shifts the viewer's attention towards a sensorial experience that goes beyond the visible, to show what cannot be seen in the human soul, in his unconscious with all its worries , its anguish and its dark sides.

“I always live in my dream: every now and then, I pay a little visit to reality”, words of Bergman himself which seem to be the perfect tagline for Joel Coen's Macbeth. Coen managed - thanks also to very noble actors and to the influences of pictorial art and cinema that preceded him - to identify in the Bard's words an ante litteram attempt to investigate the unconscious of which Shakespeare himself, for historical and chronological reasons , could never have been aware. In the same way as Shakespeare, De Chirico and Bergman, Coen's Macbeth is a work of art.
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