Sundance Review: Protagonist - Cinematical
One of the most visually and artistically exciting documentaries I've seen at this year's Sundance Film Festival -- or outside of Sundance in the past few years, frankly -- Protagonist is hard to define and easy to enjoy, seemingly scatter-shot but possessed by pure focus, full of invention and newness, but also firmly committed to sure-handed storytelling and classic tradition. Director Jessica Yu (In the Realms of the Unreal) was asked to create a documentary about the Greek dramatist Euripides; what she wound up doing was creating a documentary about the real-life journeys of four men that illustrate the themes of Euripides' ancient ideas about drama while speaking to the conflicts and challenges of our modern age. Protagonist is, at heart, a film about how story itself has a kind of DNA -- and how the ideas of storytelling replicate themselves, in that each of these subjects hears stories that help create who they are, and their stories reflect and reproduce those ideas in the stories they themselves tell.
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