Among the achievements and legacies of ancient Rome, alliteration is not the least. Anyone who thinks rhetorically of themselves today, from football commentators to handmade speakers, will occasionally bring the sounds into parade formation in such a way that a seductive harmony sets in. For example: "Seneca was a Senator". These are the first words of the film "Seneca – Or: On the Birth of Earthquakes" by Robert Schwentke. One could also say: Seneca was a front bencher in the Roman Senate, but that would be a bit rambling, it would not have the clarity that resonates in the equation of the two terms.
On the other hand, the identity-logical suggestion that conveys "Seneca was a Senator" also leads in the wrong direction. Because Seneca, the historical personality (1 before to 65) and the film character, were and are much more than a Roman senator. Playwright, noble courtier, speechwriter, a life coach who brought stoicism into shape. Robert Schwentke has now probably put the face of the American actor John Malkovich on Seneca once and for all, who brings the ancient antihero into a present for which one must use another buzzword from the Roman Empire: decadence.
The visualization was probably the idea that led Robert Schwentke to make a film about this historical figure in the first place. In German and international cinema Schwentke is an original outsider, he has already worked with Jodie Foster (on "Flightplan", 2005), commercial action films are an important part of his portfolio. In between, however, he makes idiosyncratic auteur films, for example "Der Hauptmann" in 2017, in which he revealed a view of the Second World War that very productively involved art and morality in contradictions.
"Seneca – Or: On the Creation of Earthquakes" is now his "pièce de résistance", a film that lies at odds with everything that makes up cinema today. A highly rhetorical film on all levels. The thing about languages is fundamental: Seneca spoke Latin, with Schwentke he speaks English, because of Malkovich, but also because English has virtually succeeded Latin, not only in its pragmatic function as a world language, but also in its hyperbolic function as a spectacle instrument for a high tone, next to which even an Evelyn Waugh ("Helena"!) sounds like an alley chatterer. "You fancy yourself a Socrates", it is once said about Seneca, you probably think you are a new Socrates, but this word "fancy" is again a small cosmos in itself. And, yes, that's Schwentke's "Seneca" too: a "fancy", a snarl, an imagination, an incantation.
Cipher for unleashed infantilized power
It was shot in Morocco, in a landscape that looks like Pasolini and "Star Wars" at the same time, but also after the "One Thousand and One Nights" by the syncretic European Miguel Gomes. Rome is always everything to everyone, with Schwentke also something like a cipher for an unleashed infantilized power, as it was embodied in an American president recently. But the figure of the whisperer is as old as mankind's memory of potentates and tormentors. Schwentke peddles his political allegory a little, one of the last words in his film is "civilization", which shows a garbage dump at this moment.
But one does not have to think that it was stoicism that brought us into this inhospitable situation. Without a doubt, "Seneca" wants to be taken seriously, probably even in a way that wouldn't do the movie any good.
Then one would probably have to look up in biographies what Schwentke has read, and frown with concern at various signs of the present that the world has been ending for almost two thousand years now: Rome did not "fall", but "it slipped away", says Schwentke's narrator, it slipped away (itself? us?). "Seneca" will go down in film history not as menetekel, but as one of the best exercises in high camp that has existed since Alejandro Jodorowsky or Werner Herzog.
One only has to take a look over the squad of actors brought from Germany to the stony set: Louis Hofmann, Alexander Fehling, Samuel Finzi, Lilith Stangenberg, in togen or with costume sausage fingers, a strange, scattered group in the midst of international guest stars (Geraldine Chaplin, Julian Sands).
Tinto Brass last brought about such mixed situations with his pornographic "Caligula" (1979). This time, only Seneca's talk of John Malkovich turning it into a sui generis energy source is extravagant. The man has a hard time dying because it is accompanied by silence. Is it really the case that "we, of all generations", that we of all people (first of all the German cinema audience, which is obviously thought here as a mixture of educated middle class and radical jokes) must learn to "love death and corruption" with "Seneca"?
No, to love here is a power of a cinema that once again really throws itself at the myth, as the highest pop cultural form on this side of the big words that Robert Schwentke sends so grandiosely into the desert.