Christian Subversion And Missionary Activities - 6

[G.Subramaniam]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/movies/23agora.html



THE last time we saw Rachel Weisz in an Egyptian setting, she was cast as the earnest librarian-turned-archaeologist Evelyn Carnahan in “The Mummy” and “The Mummy Returns.” In “Agora,” her latest film, she returns to the Nile to play another woman of a scholarly bent — but that is where any similarity to the archly comic-horror “Mummy” series ends.

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Trailer: 'Agora'

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Todd Heisler/The New York Times



Ms. Weisz portrays Hypatia, a philosopher and mathematician who lived in fifth-century Alexandria.

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Teresa Isasi/Newmarket Films



Oscar Isaac and Rachel Weisz in a scene from “Agora,” a historical drama set in Alexandria about a scholar who enraged Christian fundamentalists.



“Agora,” which opens in New York on Friday, is a big-budget two-hour Roman epic that features Ms. Weisz as Hypatia, the Neo-Platonist philosopher and astronomer-mathematician sometimes credited with inventing the hydrometer and the plane astrolabe. Instead of being set in the 20th century among the pharaohs’ tombs and temples, like “The Mummy,” much of the story takes place in fifth-century Alexandria, when the rising faith of Christianity is aggressively challenging traditional Greco-Roman learning and values.



“The hot topic these days is Islamic fundamentalism,” Ms. Weisz said recently over tea at an East Village restaurant near her home. “But in ‘Agora,’ it’s the Christians who are the fundamentalists” whose zealotry leads them to destroy one of the libraries of Alexandria, perhaps the greatest center of learning in the ancient world.



Some of those scenes evoke the Taliban’s demolition of statues of Buddha in Afghanistan in 2001, and Ms. Weisz, British born and educated at Cambridge, said such parallels were deliberate. In another scene, Hypatia has a veil put over her head, “and it said in the script that this should be reminiscent of the burqa,” she recalled.



“The very first thing I thought when I read the script was that this is a story about today, a very contemporary, 21st-century story,” she said. She mentioned opposition to stem cell research and to the teaching of evolution as examples of “a wall between science and religion” that still stands, and then concluded her thought: “That we’re still killing people in the name of God is primitive but true.”



“Agora,” whose title refers to the public square and marketplace where ideas were debated in the ancient Greek world, is directed by the Spanish-Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar, who wrote the screenplay with Mateo Gíl. He originally envisioned a movie about the history of astronomy from Aristotle to Einstein but changed direction when his research brought him to Hypatia and the period just before the start of the Dark Ages.



“She was an exceptional woman, a virginal intellectual who managed to impose herself as an important figure, a reference point in the philosophical and political life of Alexandria during a crucial epoch” Mr. Amenábar said. “We are accustomed to seeing lions devouring Christians in films, but not the transformation of Christians from a persecuted group to one that is powerful and armed.”



For Mr. Amenábar, “Agora” also represents a notable change in style. The two films for which he is best known, “The Other” and the Academy Award-winning “Sea Inside,” were both intimate pieces set in small spaces. “Agora,” on the other hand, required the construction of virtually an entire city in Malta for filming early in 2008 and also features a large, cosmopolitan and polyglot cast, including actors from Britain, France, Latin America, Israel and the Arab world who are Christian, Muslim and Jewish.



“That set was a wonderful gift, because all of us immediately felt like we were in a different world and time the minute we arrived for work each day,” said Max Minghella, who plays Davus, Hypatia’s young slave. “Most actors these days have to play to a green screen” instead of a real set, “but we didn’t have to work as hard to believe all the things we were doing. And I’d be lying if I said there was not a fair amount of religious debate on the set, which was really stimulating.”



Since “Agora” is a commercial enterprise, it also includes a romantic subplot. Though Hypatia never married and once publicly displayed a cloth clotted with menstrual blood to argue against the attractions of carnal love, an episode reproduced in “Agora,” the film places her at the center of an unrequited love triangle: both Davus and an admiring student who becomes imperial prefect of Alexandria pine fruitlessly for her.



Ms. Weisz, who in 2006 won an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her role in “The Constant Gardener,” describes herself as “extremely passionate about what I do” and initially found Hypatia’s cool rationality hard to fathom. Early on, she said, she “half-jokingly” suggested a masturbation scene for Hypatia to Mr. Amenábar, who demurred.



“My fear was that she would be a brain on legs, and that is not interesting to watch,” Ms. Weisz explained. “My hope was that she would be passionate and emotional and full of feeling, even though it was not being channeled into the sexual, personal, human realm. She is in love with science, with learning. It turned her on; that was the only way I could think of it.”



Gaps in the historical record allowed the filmmakers to take other liberties for dramatic effect. Mr. Amenábar brought a British historical consultant, Justin Pollard, author of “The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind,” and a Spanish astronomer onto the set, but also simplified or diverged from the facts when it suited his purposes.



The historical Hypatia, for example, may have been much older at her death than the age suggested for her in “Agora.” The film also shows her theorizing that our planetary system is heliocentric more than a millennium before Copernicus and Galileo argued that the earth is not the center of the universe, but the historical record, while full of references to her brilliance, is sketchy on that point.



“Because there are so many holes in the story, you have a lot of scope for putting in your own drama,” Mr. Pollard said. “No works of Hypatia survive, and her story is one told in fragments written by various authors in smaller pieces in other books that are now lost, translated into Arabic and which then came back to the West. So you have to take it all with a pinch of salt.”



The film also glosses over some of the distinctions between the library and museum of Alexandria, founded in the third century B.C., and what befell them afterward. Roman-era chronicles, as well as later works, suggest that at least part of the library was destroyed when Julius Caesar invaded Egypt in 48 B.C., and that Christians were responsible only for the damage done in Hypatia’s time to a secondary “daughter library,” which may also have been attacked by Muslim conquerors in the seventh century A.D.



“There is always license,” Mr. Amenábar said when asked about his focus on Christian depredations. “But in comparison to cinema today, we tried to be very rigorous and faithful to reality.”



In Europe, where “Agora” was released last year and became the box office champion of 2009 in Spain, that portrayal of Christian zealotry has provoked controversy. Hoping to head off trouble with the Vatican, the film’s Italian distributor, for example, invited Roman Catholic clergy members to an advance screening but described their reaction as “all on edge.” And fearing attacks on its Coptic Christian minority, Egypt has restricted showings of “Agora” there, according to news reports.



“Fundamentally, this is a very Christian film about the life of a martyr,” Mr. Amenábar said. “It denounces intolerance and pays homage to those voices that favor serenity and dialogue. Jesus would not have approved of what happened to Hypatia, which is why I say no good Christian should feel offended by this film.”