The time is 391 years into the 'A.D.' experiment. The place is Alexandria, Africa. The problem is ignorance at least some 440 years after the biggest library in the Mediterrian started burning. The internets are in conflict. Let the Science Fiction Begin!
In an age where everybody loves a crowd, some men control crowds of men. These men are hard. They walk through fire but they respect wood; they ridicule statues but they attend to dead bodies; they wear black; they joke; some are even accomplished public speakers. They carry rocks and they administer the stoning. They're the mob. Their patron is Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, people that walk around in sheets with metal plated muscles amid irrigated temples of stone, altars of marble, and statues of exquisite realism continue to fail to recognize that a circle is an impossible concept and only a metaphor for a fucking ecosystem.
A street fight is brewing and the mob of unemployed carpenters - called christians - are gaining on the mob of unemployed masons - called pagans. The smartest person in the city is the principal's daughter. She's the headmistress of the pagan university. She knows how to plot parabolas, hyperbolas; she knows what an ellipse is and she even describes a circle as two impossibly close foci which totally blew my mind. But she spends most of her time talking about circles and the people who've used the most circles to describe the world. She teaches kids geometry and more than a couple of Mel Gibson's secret languages. She can predict the appearance of the night sky and foretell stuff. She's like a website - an oracle. But she's continually frustrated because she wants to explain the movement of the bright things in the sky through circles and nothing else.
(Sigh).
Now this is a time when 'witch' is a serious accusation. If a witch was an embezzler of state funds to prolong her tenure in balmy Greek inspired, Roman administered Alexandria, then perhaps Rachel Weisz is playing a witch, because the heros who do all the hard work in the city understand life to be a grinding stone and therefore define two impossibly close foci as being ground by the stone. These socially awkward christians who flourish in times of misery and live under clear night skies should be able to speak at great length about the manual cycles of long symmetrical movements and compare them to the fucking stars in the sky but the state pays a fucking woman who has figured out that the sun gets larger in the summer and smaller in the winter without caring to invent sun glasses for everybody. On top of that she still can't communicate the fact that the our planet earth spins while it rotates around the sun and the rotation looks like an egg with the yolk off center, making the planet's proximity to the sun, our fucking yolk, variable. Damn. If god wanted us knowing things he wouldn't have made so many of us such terrible story tellers. Rachel Weisz is not alone, there have been many failures in the world, and the things that make them similar are far greater than the things that separate them. 'We are all brothers,' says the headmistress Hypatia, or we are all slaves to ignorance. The common language determines how great the ignorance. This English speaking foreign film from Spain raises many interesting questions. The least of which is if I'm the hand of god do I touch myself?
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