Sophie Deraspe’s film adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone updates the central themes of the original – family, exile, state power and sacrifice – to reflect the struggles of a family of first generation Algerian immigrants in Montreal as they negotiate the many violences of police racism, the criminal justice system and gang culture. In the fifth-century play, Antigone disobeys her uncle’s decree that her brother be left unburied and is sentenced to death as punishment; in Deraspe’s Antigone, Antigone Hipponome (Nahéma Ricci) is desperate to save her brother Polyneices (Rawad El-Zein) from deportation. When she breaks the law to do so she is arrested and her divided loyalty to brother and state are tested in a highly publicised trial. “Don’t tempt fate,” urges Antigone’s grandmother, Ménécée, a warning which contains within it the contradictory forces of agency and predestination. In the tradition of Greek tragedy a great man or woman is brought to ruin by their hamartia, or fatal flaw, but also by fate, a paradoxical downfall that is both self-determined and pre-ordained. For Sophocles, Antigone is the “unlucky daughter / Of an unlucky father”, doomed by heredity, but also by her choice to act as she does: “mad and so defiant”.1 Deraspe’s Antigone explores this tragic double bind while working to maintain its own identity under the weight of the original.
Antigone’s Montreal is a city of distinct zones, either homely or hostile. Public spaces are green and sunny, the Hipponome family flat is inviting, but most of Antigone’s story takes place in the strip-lit, claustrophobic environment of the police cell. This harsh aesthetic is continued in the spaces of the courtroom, morgue, immigration detention centre and airport, and visually connects the different aspects of state bureaucracy to depict the system as a totality. Deraspe gives us a material representation of what is ultimately a material process: the monitoring, arrest and deportation of immigrants. This is important. In ‘Dead Zones of the Imagination’, David Graeber argues that structural violence depends on a “tendency toward abstraction that makes it possible for everyone involved to imagine that the violence upholding the system is somehow not responsible for its violent effects”.2 Here what is usually abstract is made concrete – the violence of the system and its effects are put front and centre. While Sophocles’ Antigone is doomed by fate, Deraspe’s is condemned by the system. Antigone frames its protagonist in tight close-up and short focus. From the first shot of her, wide-eyed in the white glare of the police processing station, the film renders her as symbolic of a wider struggle. This is also explored more obviously in scenes that show her (re)construction by the media as a public figure. A rapid montage of images demonstrate how her police mug shot is edited for different purposes. In one rendering she is reframed with gang symbology, captioned as a “habibi sister” or “radical bitch”; in another scene the outline of her short hair and wide eyes are printed as a stencil, Che Guevara-style. She is repurposed as Algerian, Canadian, guilty, or innocent, depending on the particular slant. Her lack of control over her own destiny is exemplified in the manipulation of her image.
Is Antigone doomed by the state, then, and not herself? Does she have any moral agency? In Sophocles’ Antigone the protagonist places the “unwritten and unchanging” laws of the gods above the transient justice of state law, and buries her brother. Creon’s punishment of Polyneices goes beyond the norm. It is furthermore an assertion of the rule of power rather than the rule of law, motivated by personal revenge. By extension, Deraspe’s Antigone suggests a comparison between Creon’s arbitrary ruling and a modern criminal code in which Algerian immigrants can be punished in more extreme ways than their Canadian counterparts. Antigone’s brothers have committed crimes but they have been singled out for excessive punishment on the basis of their identity. For Antigone, “It is not their crimes I defend. I defend my family”. Only through a focus on an unwritten moral code, rather than a system of laws which are blind or compromised, can this injustice be made clear. The tension between agency and predestination in Deraspe’s Antigone is constructed through the relation of the state to the immigrant, rather than that of the divine to the heroic individual. Alfred R. Ferguson argues that in Sophoclean tragedy “the worst fate was not death … but to be ‘stateless’”.3 Deraspe’s Antigone follows Queens of Syria (2014), a documentary which explored the parallels Syrian refugees drew between their own experiences and those of the characters in Euripedes’ Trojan Women, mourning the homes and family they lost through displacement. Sophocles’ Antigone is similarly preoccupied by this need to belong: for “when [man] honors the laws of the land and the god’s sworn right high indeed is his city; but stateless the man who dares to dwell with dishonor”.4 For those seeking citizenship today the fates of displacement and death cannot be divided so clearly – the probability of the latter is increased by the former. Antigone’s actions to save her brother endanger her own quest for Canadian citizenship. She might ‘tempt fate’, in the words of her grandmother, not just through her own agency but due to her lack of it, her destiny and that of her family circumscribed by their immigrant status. In Sophocles’ play the gods are invisible and can’t be held accountable, forces of fate that in Deraspe’s Antigone are made concrete and literal in the form of the state. But the state isn’t fate, and can be altered and transformed. It is our duty, Deraspe suggests, to push against it.
1 Sophocles, Antigone. Translated by H. D. F. Kitto (Oxford University Press: 1962) p.31 2 D. Graeber, Dead zones of the imagination On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2006) pg. 114 3 Ferguson, Alfred R. “Politics and Man’s Fate in Sophocles’ “Antigone”.” The Classical Journal 70, no. 2 (1974) pg. 43 4 Sophocles, Antigone, tr. E. Wyckoff, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. D. Grene and R. Lattimore (Chicago 1959) pg. 354
Georgie Carr is a writer based in London.
