Mike McCahill 

Salomé review – Al Pacino and Jessica Chastain explore Wilde sex

Pacino’s brooding Herod lusts after a pre-fame Chastain in this filmed 2006 staging of Oscar Wilde’s sensual power play, writes Mike McCahill
  
  

salome al pacino jessica chastain
Al Pacino and Jessica Chastain in the filmed LA staging of Salomé. Photograph: /PR

Here is one half of what has emerged from Al Pacino’s late-blooming obsession with Wilde’s tale of transgressive sexuality. This film records the play’s 2006 LA staging: hardly standard live-event fare, it’s closer to Mike Figgis or Michael Almereyda’s experiments in giving perilously archaic texts a scholarly redesign, shot by Miss Julie’s Benoît Delhomme in dynamic close-ups that capture the players thinking their way through Wilde’s tricky, arguably misogynist scenario. A pre-stardom Jessica Chastain makes Salome a tragically self-assured headhunter, punished for knowing exactly what she wants; she even aces her potentially ridiculous big dance, which – as modern mores dictate – involves far fewer than seven veils and moves apparently inspired by Shakira. Against her, Pacino’s vulgar, ethnically indeterminate Herod furnishes this banquet with easily digested ham: if he can’t quite bring all of Wilde’s often florid imagery into focus, he’s given it a good shout – literally so, in places.

 

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