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the audience applauded

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Overrated and overhyped

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The parable of the story of Medea is known: It is the hatred of a woman. Jason, son of King Aison, is searching the Golden Fleece by whose power he intends to push his uncle Pelias from the throne which he had gained unlawfully. When Jason arrives in Kolchis, he meets Medea who immediately falls in love with him and helps him to get the Golden Fleece. Returned to Jason's homeland, they get married. Medea gives birth to two children, but the end of happiness is already in sight. Because of ambition, Jason abandons his family in order to marry Glauke, the young daughter of the king of Korinthos. Medea, blind with jealousy, takes gruesome revenge. She kills her children, minces Jason's father and poisons Glauke's children.However, Pasolini would not be Pasolini if he would just film an ancient Greek myth that belongs since centuries to the common knowledge of any learned European. Pasolini himself wrote: "The film deals with the conflict between the old religion and the atheist modern world". As if he wanted to underline his breaking off the original parable, he substituted the Greek costumes by African ones. Africa was in Pasolini's focus at least since 1971, when he began shooting his documentary "Le mura di Sana'a". By changing not only the original meaning of the Medea-parable, but by transferring the area of the play to the black continent, Pasolini also gave as a further interpretation of the Medea-parable the abyss between the Third World and the colonialist West.

Incredibly abstruse visualisation of the myth, allowing Pasolini to explore the conflict - a psychological and social conflict - between an older order of magic and the new order of reason and "civilisation". Jason needs Medea, repository of occult knowledge and superstitious practise, to help establish his rule; when he gets there, she is side-lined, and takes a terrible revenge. The storytelling here is oblique and elliptical, full of gorgeous images, sensual locations and sounds the like of which human ears rarely get to hear, full of ululations and Dionysian frenzy.The most intriguing segments involve Jason's relationship with his mentor, the centaur, who appeared in his childhood as a horse-man and his adulthood in normal human form, but the horse-form remains as a mythic trace once childhood is departed.The athlete Pasolini casts as Jason does well, physically scrumptious as he is and with the requisite banal arrogance; the casting of Maria Callas as Medea is more problematic - she's so obviously the product of the higher echelons of civilised culture that it is impossible to see her as a primitive force - her presence threatens to turn the film into a jaded millionairess' arty home movie. Still, if you try to ignore her patrician features and over-indulgent false-eyelashes, there's plenty of Pasolinian delights on display, and hardly anything in the film you would be able to see in anyone else's version of cinema.

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" describes Medea, whose hubris and amour fou for the bold and beautiful Jason leads to her downfall. Revered as a goddess by her own people, she betrays her own divinity and her race when she aids him to steal the sacred fleece, killing her own god-brother by decapitation during their escape. After bearing two sons to Jason in Greece, Medea is still not accepted and fails to adjust to Greek culture. The affection of acclaimed hero Jason strays and his ambition culminates in a betrothal to King Kreon's daughter. But when Medea learns of this betrayal and negation of her love and sacrifice her fury knows no bounds. She summons up the dark forces within her (she is a barbarian sorceress after all) for vengeance against those who have wronged her by killing Jason's sons, welcoming him with a false semblance of conciliation and acceptance while serving his dead sons to him for dinner. She sends two magnificent marriage cloaks to the king and his daughter who, when they don them, burst into flames. She then departs in rage leaving Jason to live with the results of the infamy he caused her enact through destroying her life. Maria Callas, in her only film, shows the famous range and subtlety she enjoyed as an opera star. Her fierce control and rage are memorable. Although this was a low budget film, it is extremely evocative and leaves lasting impressions. The sequence in the beginning when Jason was being tutored by the centaur Chiron about his destiny was very effective, and marked the innovative trick-photographic technique of melding man to horse to make it look very real and convincing. The primitive settings and human sacrifice of Medea's people helped to establish her dark, powerful and exotic barbarian character. English subtitles helped make up for the unfortunate dubbing. A strange and powerful version which holds it own against other interpretations.

This movie has to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Some people i guess would call it excellent for its "artsiness"... but as far as i could tell it was poorly filmed, poorly edited, terribly dubbed and poorly acted. It just didn't find any redeaming factors about it... other then the two main actors who play Jason and Medea made no other movies. Terrible.