Pier Paolo Pasolini's retelling of the story of Medea is a challenge to anyone who doesn't already know the story: Pasolini is not interested in conventional movie storytelling, so the film feels shapeless, lurching through some scenes and lingering through others until it ends almost abruptly. What he's interested in is crafting a vision of antiquity, of the age from which the myths and legends came, that's primitive and tribal, not at all the graceful world of marble gods and goddesses we've come to associate with ancient Greece. This is a world in which people scrabble for survival in bleak desert settings, filmed in Turkey and Syria. In Pasolini's film, the Argo, the ship that brings Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece, is a cobbled-together raft. The fleece itself is a somewhat ratty-looking ram's head with gilded horns. It's not exactly a film in which you'd expect to find a diva like Maria Callas, and yet her out-of-placeness somehow fits the character of Medea, a woman who would rise above almost any setting only to be dragged down by it.
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