Caligula: The Ultimate Cut 4K 2023

Caligula: The Ultimate Cut', 'remounted from scratch', 'contains not a single frame from the original' - I couldn't miss it! 'Caligula' exploded the puritanical consciousness of the Soviet viewer. I remember the tense silence in the video parlor at the moment of the double defloration of General Proculus and his bride. The smarmy bastard McDowell deflowered my moral fiber with his naughty fingers. Scenes of unbridled sexual pleasures of ancient Romans - that's why I loved this movie.

The new version is called The ultimate cut. The movie starts with long credits, and someone - something maxillary, nasal voice, tediously says that the version of the movie, which has spread around the world, is not what the producers and screenwriter wanted to do. The mischievous Guccione not only secretly filmed the 'unimitated sex' scenes, but also snuck into the editing room and inserted them into the final version. No one noticed the switch, and the viewer saw 'not a high union of sex and art', but the dirty senile fantasies of a porn magazine owner. But now, justice has been served, and impatient viewers (only 40 years have passed) will be able to enjoy the authentic version. Everything unnecessary has been thrown away.

After watching five minutes of the restored masterpiece, I froze in bewilderment - Caligula circumcised, was very similar to uncircumcised. The same opening scene with Tiberius (beautiful in its dark majesty and villainy Peter O'Toole), the transfer of the action from Capri to Rome, the address to the Praetorians - is this called 'does not contain a single frame from the original'? It's the same movie, only neutered. Almost all the sex scenes have been discarded, and now, Caligula and Drusilla, holding hands, run through the grass, and exchange chaste kisses, as brother and sister should. An idyllic screensaver for the program 'The Village Hour'. A combine harvester and his sister threshing sheaves on their lunch hour.

Out of love for art, Guccion inserted footage of the art of love into the movie. As it turns out now, 40 years later, it was these shots that were the whole point of the movie. They gave it spice and spiciness, a unique flavor of vice. By removing the scenes of 'unimitated sex' - (and by the way, why did some Thomas Negovan decide that the audience would prefer 'imitated' sex?), the creators let all the energy out of the movie. 'Caligula' without sex is like winter without snot. If that was Vidal's intention, Brass was right when he called his script 'sclerotic'. It's old man's musings on the 'nature of power', how 'all power corrupts' and other mothballs. Caligula (in the new version) walks a lot through the corridors, foyers, halls, pensively gawking with brazen, blue eyes, and pondering the fate of Roman democracy. There are plenty of such scenes in the movie - the whole 96 hours, about forty years later, you can release another version of Superultimate cut. For movie buffs. For 96 minutes Caligula dances his trademark dance (striding like the Nutcracker, and putting forward his fist), and next to it Drusilla and Caesonia joyfully bounce, and then they go to the polling station, and satisfy their only love - the love of democracy, by hand.

All power corrupts, and all edited movies dumb down. It was not possible to remove everything that offends the pensioner tastes of producers, and it turned out to be a movie from the category of soft porn. Non-erect penises are spinning in the frame, flickering flabby asses, but there is no sex! Behind the scenes someone is moaning, but who and why - the viewer must guess for himself. Maybe it's the supporters of the Roman Republic who are languishing under the iron heel of the oligarchy? Or maybe it's the hard-working Roman proletarians, muttering their immortal “bread and spectacle!” The viewer will decide for himself.

In this movie, Caligula is shown as an infantile fool amused out of boredom. A boy playing a rat, and occasionally engaged in the affairs of state. Well, he was naughty, naughty, but why kill him? Ugh, how rude those ancient Romans were! There was no sex under Caligula. Only hints of sex. The ship of debauchery doesn't work, there is no same-sex sex in the frame, neither is there bipedal sex, a couple of furry crotches in the distant plans don't count, it's a memory of the lost, Negovan's hands armed with editorial scissors didn't reach it.

The movie's only joy is the young, and beautiful Helen Mirren, Teresa Ann Savoy and McDowell. Graceful, flexible bodies smooth skin, young, shining eyes - you can not take your eyes off them. McDowell is beautiful with that vicious beauty, which was beautiful Dorian Gray. It would be interesting to see him as Wilde's character. And it would have been even more interesting if 'Caligula' had been directed by Kubrick. Here are some shots shot in Kubrick's color scheme. Kubrick's 'Caligula', and Tinto Brass' 'A Clockwork Orange', that would have been curious.

Instead we have the old man's bland, old man's grumblings about a restless youth, and corrupting power (if the movie is to be believed, Caligula was corrupt even before he became emperor, power being the litmus test that allowed him to show his 'best' qualities).