One of the most unusual filmed versions of any Shakespeare play

The 2012 Italian documentary Caesar Must Die, by the Taviani brothers, has to ran among the all-time most unusual film versions of a Shakespeare play - a performance of Julius Caesar that you''l not forget. Not that the acting is all that great - but the entire concept is so striking and so moving and so unconventional. The performance is by inmates of the high-security prison in Rome. We meet the inmates when a prison official tells them about the drama program - apparently they do a play each year? - and then we watch the auditions: each potential actor asked to do the same scene, first tearful, then enraged. We see the part of the first read through, and then, over the course of time, we watch the actors rehearse their scenes - sometimes alone, sometimes w/ others. Only at the end (and a few moments of intro) do we see the actual on-stage performance, the scene of the death of Brutus. By careful editing and scripting, the Tavianis give us the whole play - obviously, in a highly amended fashion, and in Italian - in sequence. It adds special poignancy and immediacy to see the scenes shot in various prison locales - a two-man cell, an exercise yard, etc. I think it's pretty obvious that this is not a "pure" documentary, that the filmmakers asked the actors to work on certain scenes in certain locales, that the "conversations" among the actors and among the guards are scripted or at least heavily directed - still, it's a film that explores the edges of documentary, and that gives us a real chill, these very dangerous guys, some serving life sentences, so committed to this passion for theater and language. In one tense moment, the guy playing Caesar, a big brute of a man, no doubt a leading mob figure in his time, steps out of character and gets mad at the guy he's playing the scene with - we don't know really what happened, but it's one of several odd moments that probes the boundary between art and reality. The "curtain call" scene is terrific - the exuberance - and then the men are led back to their cells; inevitably, we feel sorrowful, but of course we also can't lose site that these guys are hardened criminal, not petty thieves. And throughout all of this, we do get to see a much-abridged version of the play, with a Rome setting that oddly replicates the Forum and that intensifies the feeling of darkness and conspiracy that pervades this play.