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INTRIGUED BY THE HUGE WAVE of media attention to Christopher Nolan\u2019s new film version of Homer\u2019s Odyssey, my husband and I went to see the film last week. He wanted to see it in an IMAX cinema, so we booked the tickets on a Monday to take the two-hour drive to Bordeaux the following Friday to see it.<\/p>\n
Over the course of the week, it became apparent that, although not as beset by monsters as Odysseus\u2019s journey, it was not going to be the carefree venture a trip to the cinema usually is.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, a fire had broken out 30 km to the west of Bordeaux, in the environs of Arcachon. We kept an eye on the news and its development. As it hadn\u2019t reached Bordeaux, and as we had booked the (nonrefundable) tickets, we decided to go.<\/p>\n
It was a blazing Friday, of a piece with the rest of this freakishly hot summer. A sky that glowed with its own blue intensity in the absence of any clouds. The sun like a furnace in the middle of it. We visited cafes in the shade and the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Aquitaine to take the bite out of the heat. But works on the tram line across the Pont de Pierre required a 10-minute walk across heat-reflecting pavement and river in full, radiant sun, the heat like a weight across our shoulders as we dodged and were dodged by cyclists and e-scooter travellers as eager to get to the other side and the shade of buildings as we were.<\/p>\n
Cinemas, as usual in the summer, are an oasis of climate-controlled cool. We drank what felt like our bodyweight of cold water, then found our seats.<\/p>\n
The Odyssey has always been a well-loved story of mine. When I was a kid, I had an abridged, child-friendly (and child-appropriate) version of it that I read over and over. But even that can\u2019t prepare you for the hit you get when you encounter the original. The gravity and richness of the intertwined narratives, each with their own sense of peril and suffering: the daring exploits and sheer, super hero-like bravado of Odysseus, along with his foolish hubris; the few examples of human truth, goodness and dignity among the throngs of men rendered ferocious and pitiless through greed and war.<\/p>\n
I was keen to see Nolan\u2019s take on the story. For a start, the Olympic gods were out, no more of a presence than any of our own gods. I understand the desire to leave them out \u2013 the film Troy in the 00s had also effaced them from the screen. But I always kind of miss the entertainment of their petty cavilling and grand gestures. I think, too, there is good reason to include the mess they make of things with their omnipotent meddling. What a cogent expression of our own interference in the workings of the Earth. <\/p>\n
Nolan took a different direction. Matt Damon\u2019s Odysseus is world- and war-weary, horrified at the descent of his colleagues into brutal, elementally vicious and violent creatures, acting with neither reason nor compassion. Horrified at his own complicity and descent into such a state, he careers from one disaster to another.<\/p>\n
You could almost make a case for his entire trajectory from Troy to Ithaca as an elaborate hallucination brought on by PTSD and drugs. Yet, tragically, the violence doesn\u2019t stop with his homecoming. We are projected into a scenario in which avarice drives men into wars, but also provokes intolerable behaviour and suffering far from the battlefield. And, rather dubiously, he succumbs to it again himself in one final act of vengeance.<\/p>\n
Rather shaken from this end-of-days scenario, we took the public transport boat service this time to avoid the trek across the bridge. It zig-zagged across the Garonne River, bringing us finally to a tram station. As I stared down the track during the inexplicably long wait for the tram, I wondered that the air seemed to have become thicker, an entity of its own rather than something to be looked through. As this continued, I realised the wind must have turned, blowing smoke from the fire into the city. By the time we reached the car, everything was in haze. <\/p>\n
It took more an hour to get out of Bordeaux from our park and ride near the northern outskirts. The traffic was unusually heavy. The GPS took us on a meandering journey, full of stops and starts, trying to avoid backups. And I realised, looking at the number of international number plates and full caravans around us, that we were in the midst of an evacuation. Holiday-makers from all over Europe, people who had somewhere else to flee to, were escaping home. Images of those who didn\u2019t have that opportunity came in through the news: people assembling in large sport and multi-purpose venues who might never see their homes intact again. <\/p>\n
Since last Wednesday (five days ago), at time of writing, 42,000 hectares have been ravaged, and 220,000 people have been evacuated.<\/p>\n
We eventually pulled out of the traffic to our exit, and continued our way home on more open roads. But across the horizon to the west, a long, muscular plume of smoke \u2013 grey, brown and rust-red \u2013 extended and reclined across the sky, taking on the glow of the setting sun in dull reflection of the flames that had caused it. Smoke that was adding to the carbon trapped in the atmosphere, increasing the climate heating that exacerbates conditions leading to fires such as this, and those all over the world. And we continued our own wandering journey home \u2013 our car emissions, though on a more diminutive level, doing much the same.<\/p>\n
Still in the emotional grip of this movie, it was impossible not to think of present-day moral deterioration, our hubris and avarice, untempered by reason and common sense, bringing about the destruction of our very real world. Our habitat and the basis for life as we know it on Earth. <\/p>\n
On screen, we watched the fires and unspeakable violence that accompanied the final battle that destroyed the great city of Troy and its people. It seems we can also watch it here, around us, in real time. A slow-motion inferno of our beautiful planet. Apart from our eventual destruction with our environment, it\u2019s to our shame that our legacy as creative, intelligent beings is literally going up in flames.<\/p>\n
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