The concern that Nolan’s ‘woke’ endeavour might fall flat due to the audience’s habits

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is released today – a blockbuster based on a Greek epic in which there is hardly a single Greek character. Zendaya plays the goddess Athena; the very blonde South African Charlize Theron plays the North African – and therefore presumably Black – nymph Calypso; the English actress Samantha Morton plays the Italian Circe, the American Anne Hathaway plays the Greek Penelope, the Colombian John Leguizamo plays the swineherd Eumaeus, and the Indo-British Himesh Patel plays Odysseus’s brother-in-law. And then there’s Lupita Nyong’o, who is not only Kenyan but black – very black, ebony-skinned – and plays both Helen and Clytemnestra. And here the controversy explodes with a ferocity that swineherds and sorceresses had never deserved.

No one batted an eyelid over Ulysses’s brother-in-law, played by an actor of Indian origin and therefore dark-skinned, but when it comes to the most beautiful Helen in the world, the ethnic sensitivities of some critics – and even the ultra-political sensibilities of director Nolan and his screenwriters – are suddenly awakened. Simply brilliant publicity. Who knows. Nolan and Nyong’o herself have explained the reasons behind the choice in detail, all of which are explicitly ideological: a gesture of representation in an epic that has always lacked it. And in a television interview, Ms Nyong’o went so far as to criticise Homer – obviously without any irony – for allegedly featuring few women (and who knows, perhaps never any Black women) in his works. It remains to be seen, however – and we do allow ourselves to raise a few doubts – whether the paying audience will even notice all this conceptual and political wrangling or whether, as has already happened with Zendaya the goddess and Theron the sorceress, they will simply buy a ticket without giving too much thought to the ethnic philology of the myth or to the ideological statements and hidden messages conveyed through skin colour by director Nolan. If this were the case, Nolan’s endeavour – it must be said with caution – would risk remaining a discussion amongst insiders, a manifesto read only by those who write it. This is not an implausible hypothesis, given how quickly people forget who provoked the wrath of the fair-haired Achilles or the trials and tribulations of Ulysses, provided it is done with a modicum of charm.

Those who denounce – not always without reason – the absurdity of ‘woke’ culture point to the German actress Diane Kruger as a prime example: Elena, equally alien to Hellenic culture in "Troy", a film that butchered the myth to the point of featuring a Yankee-faced Achilles, played by Brad Pitt, who died beneath the walls of Troy. Others recall the whitewashing of yesteryear: the Mongol Genghis Khan played by John Wayne; the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba portrayed by Gina Lollobrigida, a native of Ciociaria; Andromeda played by the blonde English actress Judi Bowker; and a Middle Eastern Jesus who was invariably depicted as blonde with blue eyes. American cinema, that splendid circus, that boudoir of stardust, not only cast white actors in black roles, but also cast ‘half-black’ actors in ‘super-white’ roles, as in the film "The Vikings", with two Nordic heroes played by the Italian-American Ernest Borgnino and the Hungarian Jew Tony Curtis. Not to mention the Egyptian Omar Sharif in the role of the Russian Doctor Zhivago. Nolan injects a political edge into it; he wants to send out a message, as he has said, but who knows what the audience will actually pick up on, given that they are now thoroughly accustomed to an increasingly diverse society in which even the faces of film stars have become varied, and have been accustomed practically since time immemorial to the world of cinema – that of Hollywood – where we have already seen everything played by anyone and everyone. So the Black actress Lupita can play Elena ‘with the white arms’ just as easily as John Wayne, the hero of the West, could play the Mongol conqueror. And probably, regardless of the director’s intentions, nobody will take any notice. With or without ideology, the public will go to the cinema anyway. And they’ll say the film is good, or bad. But we’ll find out soon enough. ‘The Odyssey’ is released today.