Medea feels like one of Pier Pasolini's more obscure and lesser known works. Being overshadowed by some of his heavyweights and more controversial films, Medea can be easily forgotten and tossed aside. This is unfortunate seeing how unique this film feels.

What feels riveting about Medea is one: our lead's performance is outstanding. She plays Medea with utmost confidence and terror that paints a memorable portrait of a character that's unforgettable. Two: while camera work seems to break necessary rules, the audience feels unusually drawn to what's inflame due to great locations, excellent production design for its time, and it's dramatic dialogue. Unfortunately the dialogue does feel too good on paper and nowhere else which can take the viewer out of the experience. Like something written as a novel first which wasn't meant to be adapted in the first place.

The film explores fascinating themes like jealousy, betrayal, relationships, etc. The story explores feminism in a way that could be beneficial to see. The viewer sees this in a strong and empowering way and also in extreme and harmful ways.

Medea has both good and not so good examples of women's liberation. While Medea represents a strong genuinely fierce woman who is a force to be reckoned with. She comes across distant from other characters who she should be closer with; like other members of her family.

Medea's passion and determination to achieve her goal I can imagine is refreshing to see when many female characters are portrayed as supporting and passive ones. Especially for a 1969 audience (which is the film I saw of the story), seeing a woman with that much drive and ability to excel probably felt invigorating. In fact, much of her character feels threatening almost to her counter male characters who don't see her for what she would like to be seen as.

Unfortunately since most of the characters don't provide the "respect" she feels and frankly, we feel she might deserve, she's given less. Much less. I think this is where the story flips when this unfair misunderstanding makes things too unbearable for Medea. As she is tossed aside for another wife for Jason, she's seen as a tool or a means to an end and this is where I think, she takes it too far and removes herself from the title of "heroin."

Her almost ruthless nature unravels when she kills her own children which is not only extreme but there is fundamentally something psychopathic when we imagine a mother killing her own child for selfish reasons. Arguably the most genuine and strongest bond we can imagine in human relationships is between a mother and her child. I think this is when her character changes in the viewer's eyes. We don't sympathize with her anymore and really question her sanity. She murdered her own children out of spite for her husband!

I've wondered why Pasolini chose to write such a story and I think I have two theories: One, I think he might've been thinking about the innate power and determination women actually have. Perhaps it was a cautionary tale essentially saying "Don't mess with the women, they can actual tear you apart." Maybe he foresaw a time where women would strike back due to oppression and unequal treatment.

My second theory is that maybe he's not very sympathetic to the female sex at all. Maybe he was attempting to suggest women will be the death of us if they are not "kept in check." Honestly I would like to think the first option but knowing Pasolini's other works and his seeming disregard for many good qualities of humanity in his films, I don't know how much I'd bet on it. Ultimately I wouldn't recommend it to examine female liberation but it is worth checking into for a discussion anyway.

For film buffs, this one is checking out but maybe won't be the best example to examine closely. Technically and structurally there are moment-ruining flaws that are difficult to get over and with he exception of our lead, performances aren't extremely impressive. Definitely not for everyone.

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" describes Medea, whose hubris and amour fou for the bold and beautiful Jason leads to her downfall. Revered as a goddess by her own people, she betrays her own divinity and her race when she aids him to steal the sacred fleece, killing her own god-brother by decapitation during their escape. After bearing two sons to Jason in Greece, Medea is still not accepted and fails to adjust to Greek culture. The affection of acclaimed hero Jason strays and his ambition culminates in a betrothal to King Kreon's daughter. But when Medea learns of this betrayal and negation of her love and sacrifice her fury knows no bounds. She summons up the dark forces within her (she is a barbarian sorceress after all) for vengeance against those who have wronged her by killing Jason's sons, welcoming him with a false semblance of conciliation and acceptance while serving his dead sons to him for dinner. She sends two magnificent marriage cloaks to the king and his daughter who, when they don them, burst into flames. She then departs in rage leaving Jason to live with the results of the infamy he caused her enact through destroying her life. Maria Callas, in her only film, shows the famous range and subtlety she enjoyed as an opera star. Her fierce control and rage are memorable. Although this was a low budget film, it is extremely evocative and leaves lasting impressions. The sequence in the beginning when Jason was being tutored by the centaur Chiron about his destiny was very effective, and marked the innovative trick-photographic technique of melding man to horse to make it look very real and convincing. The primitive settings and human sacrifice of Medea's people helped to establish her dark, powerful and exotic barbarian character. English subtitles helped make up for the unfortunate dubbing. A strange and powerful version which holds it own against other interpretations.

Pasolini's MEDEA, boosting the household name Maria Callas' one-off celluloid bash, mesmerically sinks its teeth into the fecund soil of ancient Greek myth, story-wise, it welds together Jason and the Argonauts' quest of golden fleece with the play of Euripides, and takes liberty with Pasolini's trenchant interpretation about possession, betrayal and revenge.

Exhibiting the sui-generis topography of Göreme in Turkey's Cappadocia Region, an immemorial mountainous area grandly preserved with its ancient architecture (caves, churches etc.) and scraggy outlook, the place itself is a marvel to behold, nevertheless, Pasolini makes great play of his unfettered imagination to limn the mythical tribe of Medea (Callas), a pageantry of madcap costumes and primitive implements, topping off by a head-rolling, blood-drinking human-sacrifice ritual in supplication of harvest, savagery and sanctity, like conjoined twins, forever mediating mankind's self-seeking turpitude.

Catching sight of Jason (Gentile) for the first time, as if struck by coup-de-foudre, Medea, asks her brother Absyrtus (Tramonti) to steal the golden fleece, together they join Jason and the co., en route to Greece, Absyrtus is sacrificed in the hands of Medea (not unlike the boy killed earlier) in order to defer the pursing forces, executed with Pasolini's clinical philosophy, it has a discerning tang of disinterest countervailing the cockamamie action, and that is distinctive from Pasolini's treatment.

The second half takes place in Jason's homeland, where Medea has borne two boys for him, but Jason is bent on marrying the Corinthian princess Glauce (Clémenti), which causes Medea and her sons in danger of exile. So, perdition is brewed in Medea's witchery, and Pasolini capriciously presents us two different approaches with the same denouement, but the crunch is the scandalous filicide served as the ultimate malice from a jilted lover, which would be plundered with bone-chilling assiduity in Joachim Lafosse's OUR CHILDREN (2012).

Albeit its esoteric backstory and accompanied by a religious assortment of folkloric tuneage, MEDEA belongs to the more digestible bracket among Pasolini's corpus, and Callas is more than persuasive in imparting Medea's desperation and resolution, a concrete cause célèbre engraved with Pasolini's immense ambition and poetic pedagogy, MEDEA deserves a better reputation.