Le retour d'Ulysse

Do people still read Homer? I was exposed to him in high school, which I now think is too young, given the lack of consistency in training in literature and the rather poor translation in favor at the time. To someone who's steeped in the story and doesn't have to go through The Catalogue of Ships, The Illiad and The Odyssey are fine stories. The former, an old friend of mine noted, is what you told your wife when she asked what you had been doing for twenty years, and the latter what you told your buddies at the bar.

And the first half of this movie, in which Penelope holds off her suitors by promising to remarry after finishing the rug which she unweaves when everyone else is asleep, is what wives told their husbands when they returned from the war. Wasn't that clever of me, dear? Hubby nods, calls the cops, realizes he is the cops and the courts too, and shoots the guys who have been drinking his booze and getting holes in the knotty-pine paneling he put up himself. Then neither husband nor wife mentions it again. Shut up, Telemachus.

The handling is pure Illustrated Text, and why not? Everyone knows the story, and the movies were a way to see the actors in their stage-like poses and florid movements, just like on the stage, for centimes instead of francs.