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Revengers Tragedy

Screening on Film
Directed by Alex Cox.
With Christopher Eccleston, Kevin Knapman, Michael Ryan.
UK, 2003, 35mm, color, 109 min.
English with French subtitles.

Like Death and the Compass, Cox’s other literary adaptation stars Christopher Eccleston and features a quite mannerist mise-en-scene, with production design by Cox’s frequent collaborator Cecilia Montiel. The source material here is The Revenger’s Tragedy, a Jacobean play from 1606 attributed to Thomas Middleton, and like so much English drama of its era, it is a bloody tale of lust and murder littered with corpses. Cox transplants it to a post-apocalyptic Liverpool in the distant future of 2011 where government surveillance satellites patrol the skies and media images are omnipresent.  The film’s ironic stance towards its own gore is clearly a directorial strategy whereby Middleton’s dark musings on the corrosive nature of power are updated to point out that the contemporary fascination with violence reveals a corruption stemming from the media and the state alike.

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