Nolan, worthy of Homer. Anyone who calls his "Ulysses" ‘rubbish’ deserves to be confined to a small cinema

Three hours of a masterpiece – what can we say? What can we say about a performance (and a production) that flies by without ever becoming tedious, perfectly crafted to tell the ancient story of the man who conquered Troy after a long siege, using the ruse of the wooden horse? It then took him about ten years to return to Ithaca – which meant home, his wife and the son he’d left behind as a baby. The sea was full of dangers, from storms to monsters and giants. As if that weren’t enough, two formidable women vied for his time: the sorceress Circe and the nymph Calypso. One struck fear with her magic, the other drugged him with the lotus flower. What can we say in the face of three hours of great cinema without a single dull moment? My colleagues come to the rescue. Francesco Piccolo urges *Repubblica* – once such a respectable newspaper, my dear lady – to write the word ‘cazzata’ in full on several occasions. ‘It’s a load of rubbish,’ writes Francesco Piccolo in no uncertain terms, and not just once (one can’t very well censor such a refined, *Fantozzian* judgement). At the end of the article, he adds, in true Veltroni style, ‘but also a beautiful film’.

If we had not already seen Nolan’s film, reading the article would not have been quite so entertaining. A scathing judgement hurled by someone who, despite being a screenwriter or co-writer on many dreadful Italian films himself, cannot claim to be free from so much utter rubbish. It is almost endearing: dwarves on the shoulders of giants – if they ever managed to get there. Christopher Nolan – whom we don’t even always like; we’re not blinded by passion – has created a masterpiece here, just as he did with "Dunkirk": the daring rescue of the 300,000 Allied soldiers who were trapped during the Second World War at Dunkirk – or Dunkerque, the northernmost city in France. They had been surrounded; they were rescued from England by crossing the English Channel by any means possible, right down to small boats and fishing vessels. It is Operation Dynamo that Nolan magnificently recounts on three levels: land, sea and air.

Homer provides a wealth of material, not all of which is used in the film – it should have been at least two hours longer. He invented the adventure himself, with the help of a few gods – who are kept to a minimum here. As a consummate storyteller – and this applies to both of them, who are highly skilled at playing with chronology – he begins with a glimpse of the headquarters in Ithaca, where his wife Penelope remains with her tapestry, which no longer fools anyone, and his now-grown son Telemachus: the heir to the throne, should he ever decide to accept that his father Odysseus has disappeared; and after some twenty years (a rough estimate – Telemachus was in nappies and now wears a delightful little skirt), he might well be considered dead, allowing her to choose one of the suitors who pass the time by eating and drinking. Having won the Trojan War, Odysseus tries to return home. But with no aeroplanes or reliable weather forecasts, he is tossed about by seas and winds, by Cyclopes and giant warriors with a taste for human flesh. Then there are Scylla and Charybdis: on one side another monster and on the other a whirlpool that swallows up ships and sailors.

We must admit we were a little apprehensive before seeing the film. We’re not so jaded as to think you can love “Inception” and remain unmoved by “Interstellar”. Those doubts vanished when we saw the wooden horse washed up on the shore, lying askew on the foreshore, and inside it, soldiers exhausted by the stench, in danger of drowning. Christopher Nolan is always brilliant. It’s cinema that’s become small.