Chilean director Alejandro Amenabar is a celebrated film-maker. His works include powerful, provocative films like “The Sea Inside” with Javier Bardem “Open your Eyes” with Penelope Cruz, and “The Others” with Nicole Kidman. He is also a successful composer and one of the top art-house directors currently working in Europe. In this film he has swerved right away from his intense small-scale dramas with a huge, historical, costume-drama set in the 5th century AD. It plays out during the rise of militant Christianity, when converts were intent on eradicating any form of religion that was not Christian. Jews, pagans, and anyone who did not convert to Christianity, had to fear for their lives.
The screenplay for “Agora” was written by Amenabar, in collaboration with Mateo Gil. As the title implies, the film is about the exchange of ideas and opinions that was attacked by the fearful, anger as the pagan past clashed with the rising new faith of Christianity. The Greek word “agora” describes a public space in the centre of a town where the people could gather to exchange views and gather news. It was the place to hear the orators, news-bearers and teachers of old and new things and, of course, the city’s rulers used the agora to address the citizens.
Dircetor Alejendro Amenabar
The radical change came when, in 312 A.D the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and made it the state religion. Constantine chose to tolerate the continuation of pagan beliefs and rituals, but he spent a great deal of time and money to consolidate the centrality and dominance of Christianity. He built the first St. Peter’s in Rome and the churches that protected the Holy Places of Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
Constantine forged a close and complex connection between the State and the Church, a tie that would to continue for centuries to come and would radically alter the nature of politics, war, wealth and - especially - power. The indissoluble link between the Christian Church and State encouraged the officials and the members of the Christian church to believe that they had sovereign power that enabled them to dictate both the material and spiritual lives of their subjects. Christianity became militant, and in the belief that they were doing God’s work, they start to stamp out all other religions. Inevitably, greed and power-lust tainted the religious fervor and terrible things were done in the name of God.
“Agora” is set in Alexandria, the ancient capital of Egypt, at a time when the various groups still lived in a fragile state of suspicious but controlled peace. The Jews were contemptuous of the Christian followers, seeing them as a jumped-up bunch of trouble-makers who had chosen a dead carpenter to be their God. At the same time, the last pagans were still worshipping ancient deities like Serapis in temples that had been standing for centuries.
Orestes played by Oscar Isaac.
The fragile peace was overthrown by the advent of the Parabolani Christians, a sect who claimed to live in poverty because their mission was to feed, help and protect the poor and the desperate. They were an intense and fervent group, aggressive towards the rich and aristocratic residents of Alexandria. It was a revolution initially inspired by high principles, but it readily devolved into a greedy and self-serving campaign of violence and vengeance, led by the angry firebrand Ammonius (Ashraf Barhom), the leader of the Parabolani Christians.
While Ammonius raged in the streets, Hypatia, (Rachel Weisz) and her father Theon (Michel Lonsdale) were teaching philosophy and reason to the sons of the leading families in the city. Hypatia was an anomaly in those times. She had a brilliant mind, and her father had given her an excellent education. She understood mathematics, she was well-read and she was fascinated by an area of knowledge that had barely been named – astronomy. She and her father still followed the old pagan ways and their workplace and home in the agora, was part of a pagan shrine, which infuriated the radical Christians. Hypatia was not deeply committed to those pagan rituals and beliefs. She looked forward to new insights into the movements of the Sun, Moon and stars. It became became an area of intense study for her and, as history has shown, she was centuries ahead of her time.
She believed that the Earth was round, not flat, and she charted the courses of the stars and formed a vision of the Earth and the planets that came close to what astrologers in later centuries discovered. But she was a woman, and despite her intelligence and her deep study, her theories remained derided and ignored. They were finally proved to be true, mainly by Galileo’s findings, a thousand years later. Her identity and the importance of her work was highlighted when the first-ever Apollo space mission landed on the Moon. It landed in an area named after Hypatia.
The film, “Agora” follows the last years of Hypatia’s life, as the riots of the Parobolani Christians broke out in Alexandria. She had become a target for the newly powerful and dogmatic Christian faithful. For them, anything that was not mentioned in the Bible, was deemed to be sinful and the work of the devil. But it was her gender that antagonised them most. The zealots overlooked those parts of the Christian scriptures that showed how Jesus had many friends and followers who were women, and the gospel recounts several incidents in which Jesus intervened on behalf of women.
But in that early Christian militancy, there was harsh opposition to the idea of giving women any status or power. Hypatia’s beliefs, her outspoken courage, her education and research were vast but when she tried to impart to others, she was stepping over a line. She was also beginning to gain followers, which angered the Christian authorities and she was seized on the street, stripped naked and beaten to death while the crowds watched.
Davus (Max Minghella)
That is, more or less, what we know, in hard factual terms, about Hypatia. The early Christian Church did everything it could to erase all traces of her work but her reputation has endured through the centuries. In the feminist years of the 1960s when women were looking for traditional icons, Hypatia became something of a poster girl for modernity, feminism, secularism and science because she was placed in an unlikely pantheon alongside Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, Galileo and others.
There are no records of her personal life and her relationships. If they had ever existed, they were destroyed over the centuries and what we see in the film is an imagined personal narrative that connects with the hard facts that we do know about Hypatia. In the script created by Alejandro Amenabar, in collaboration with Mateo Gil we learn that she never married. Her ardour was directed towards her passion for science and mathematics, and she taught the young men of status and wealth in Alexandria. She also allowed the slaves to be present in her classes and they too gained from her teaching.
The script imagines a classic emotional triangle. There is Orestes (Oscar Isaac) rich, bold and aristocratic who is in love with Hypatia. There is also Davus (Max Minghella) a slave who is also in love with his mistress; but rampaging in the streets of Alexandria there is Ammonius (Ashraf Barhom), the fanatical leader of the Parobolani Christians who fixates on Hypatia. That is the core of the story and around it is the drama of the Christian attacks on the Jewish Synagogues and the pagan temples.
Amenabar goes to extreme lengths to make the film look handsome and credible. Superb designs, filled out with superb CGI designs bring the panorama of Alexandria in 391 A.D to life. It’s a brilliant, vivid, panorama, shot in Malta by cameraman Xavi Gimenez; with the art direction of Guy Hendrix Dyas; and the beautifully realised and authentic costumes, the film is a visual pleasure in its own right.
The acting is excellent and Rachel Weisz is wonderfully acute and honest in her portrayal of a beautiful woman, who was disinterested in what she saw around her. She was focused on the mysteries of the universe, and to pull that off, without her looking like a moony idealist takes some doing. It’s a film with a great deal to offer.
