Ich kann mich nicht daran erinnern, dass sich jemand über Diane Kruger als Helena aufgeregt hat. Die sieht ja nun auch nicht gerade "griechisch" aus.
Der amerikanische Altphilologe Daniel Mendelsohn, der selbst vor Kurzem eine englische Übersetzung der Odyssee vorgelegt hat, schreibt:
Helen of Troy is starting wars again. But this time the legendarily beautiful, semi-divine queen of myth, whose adulterous elopement with the Trojan prince Paris brought on the 10-year-long Trojan War, has launched a thousand tweets.
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As it turns out, the auteur [Nolan] is using Helen just as the Greek authors did: to provoke, challenge and discomfit how we think about beauty and identity, about who we are and how we relate to our world.
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Later authors such as the playwright Euripides introduce new adjectives, for instance, “reddish-blonde.” But on the whole, the Greeks didn’t care much what she looked like.
What they did care about was how she talked. Already in Homer’s telling, Helen is an effective and indeed seductive speaker. In the “Iliad,” she eloquently rues her mad infatuation with Paris, delivers some nice jabs in an argument with no less a debate opponent than the goddess Aphrodite and effectively has the last word in the epic, pronouncing a powerful final eulogy for the fallen Trojan hero Hector. In the “Odyssey,” she beguiles a group of dinner guests with tales of her efforts to help the Greek cause from behind enemy lines in Troy.
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the “real” Helen of Troy, you could argue, was a figure associated above all with profound debates about the nature of reality and the power of words, the seductiveness of falsehood and the fragility of truth. In that sense, at least, the controversy about the new “Odyssey” movie, like so many of the arguments being conducted today, connects us to the Greeks’ Helen in a far more authentic way than the choice of this or that actress could.
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Whatever else the debate over Christopher Nolan’s casting has proved, it certainly shows that, by forcing people to confront — or reveal — their own often irrational notions of what is beautiful and ugly, true and false, Helen of Troy still has something to tell us.
www.filmdienst.de
