Sophie Deraspe’s ‘Antigone’

Francesca Chaplin
Ostraka
Published in
8 min readJan 14, 2020

Sophie Deraspe’s ‘Antigone’, which stars Nahéma Ricci in the title role, won the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival prize for Best Canadian Film. Deraspe updates Sophocles’ tragedy, setting it in contemporary Montreal. In Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’, both of Antigone’s brothers are dead after murdering one another in the Theban civil war; the play revolves around Antigone’s decision to contravene Creon’s decree and bury Polynices. In Deraspe’s adaptation, which draws on the 2008 case of Fredy Villanueva, the police kill Eteocles and arrest Polynices. Antigone, learning that Polynices has a strong chance of being deported, determines to take his place in prison: she thinks it probable that she will be treated more leniently because she has a clean record and is a minor. She crops her hair, copies his tattoos, and wears padding to bulk herself up, switching with him during visitation times. She sacrifices her own future to facilitate his escape.

Sophocles’ Antigone dares to defy those in authority. She stands up to Creon, defending her own actions and asserting that her choice is the honourable one: Creon’s decrees are surpassed by the gods’ unwritten laws (lines 450–455). She strikes back at him: ‘If you think my actions foolish, that amounts to a charge of folly by a fool!’ (469–470). Antigone is equally courageous in Deraspe’s adaptation. Her feistiness is not directed at Creon — in this film Haemon’s father often offers Antigone help — but at law enforcement figures. A frustrated, belittling police interviewer interrogates Antigone about the escaped Polynices’ location. He slams his fist down, asking ‘What do you know?’ Antigone piercingly replies: ‘Our eldest brother is dead, shot by the police. Can you bring him back?’ Later, she defends her timid fellow prisoner, confronting the guard who humiliates her. ‘Think in your room’, the guard bellows; ‘Think in your office’, Antigone returns. Sophocles’ Antigone draws on the higher law of the gods; Deraspe’s draws on the higher law of the heart. In court she admits she broke the law but asserts that she would do it again because her heart tells her to support her brother: ‘mon coeur me dit’. At the film’s climax, she tells the judge ‘I vomit on your proceedings’. The judge asks if she cares about getting citizenship; Antigone states that citizenship is merely a piece of paper and advises the judge to ‘wipe your arse with it’. She fires at the judge the potent line that ‘your disguise as a citizen hides your heart’. Like the one in Sophocles’ play, this Antigone establishes a conflict between obeying authority and supporting her family. For Deraspe’s heroine, nothing is more important than familial loyalty and compassion.

Antigone’s snide interviewer states: ‘You broke the law for your brother’; ‘I have only one left’, Antigone replies. This calls to mind one of Antigone’s most famous speeches in Sophocles’ tragedy: her lament that she could get another husband or child if she lost them but that, with her parents dead, she can never have another brother (909–912). For both the ancient and modern Antigone, a brother must be cherished. One of the most moving parts of Deraspe’s film is when Christian (Haemon’s father/the Creon figure) asks Antigone how she can love and sacrifice herself for her brother in spite of what he has done — his dealing and petty crimes. Antigone states that when she thinks of Polynices she sees him as a young boy whom no one picks up when he stretches out his arms because he has no parents. We have a potent image of Polynices’ vulnerability and how he has been disregarded. Antigone must fight for him because no one else will.

Segal, in his introduction to the Greek tragedy, writes that Antigone is ‘human and moving in the fragile strength of her defiance’ (2003, 5). Antigone is both resilient and emotional. Segal’s assertion that Antigone has a ‘fragile strength’ can be applied to Deraspe’s adaptation. As Antigone prepares to swap places with her brother, there is a close-up shot of her, head freshly shorn: she looks determined and defiant, but she is also crying. She is a juxtaposition. We see that her decision is not without cost and burden.

Antigone’s male interviewer tells her that ‘You’re way in over your head, little girl’. His tone is condescending. His focus on Antigone’s gender, and suggestion that her actions are inappropriate in the face of it, recalls (to an extent) Sophocles’ Creon, who is adamant that ‘while I live a woman shall not rule’ (525) and is preoccupied with the idea that female power is threatening and could unman him (679–680). It also means that Deraspe’s film strikes a chord with a modern audience concerned with the belittlement of women.

Another aspect of the original Greek tragedy that this adaptation retains and reworks is the friction between sisters Antigone and Ismene. In the opening of Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’, when the concerned Ismene refuses to join Antigone’s plan to bury their brother, Polynices, Antigone turns on her, accusing her of dishonouring the gods’ wishes (line 77) and repeatedly asserting that she will hate her (86; 93). Later, when Ismene tries to take on blame in the face of a raging Creon, Antigone treats her scornfully, rebuking her for trying to share her death and falsely claiming involvement (546–7). The sisters are often at odds with each other; Antigone’s fierce determination clashes with Ismene’s concern.

Deraspe in her film preserves these dynamics. Her Ismene, like Sophocles’, is fearful on hearing Antigone’s plans and tries to resist involvement. Ismene tells her sister that her plot to assume Polynices’ place in prison and prevent his deportation will not work; Antigone replies, with a mixture of sharpness and vulnerability, ‘Shut up. This is taking all the courage I have’. ‘I’m scared for you’, Ismene states, as she does in Sophocles’ tragedy (line 82), to no avail. The core clash between Antigone and Ismene comes very near to the end of Deraspe’s adaptation. Polynices must leave Canada and return home; their grandma determines to go with him, as does Antigone, in spite of Haemon’s father Christian’s offer to become her guardian and pay for her studies. Ismene, however, does not want to leave. ‘I want a normal life’, she states — a house and a job. ‘But we are not normal’, Antigone replies. As her sister speaks further of her wish to conform, Antigone addresses her in a tone of disbelief and disgust: ‘You’d reach for the happiness they toss to you, like a dog?’ Antigone’s scornful treatment of her sister is familiar from Sophocles, but Ismene’s reaction here is stronger: she slaps Antigone.

In his discussion of sisterhood in Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’, Goldhill asserts that Antigone’s idea of familial love is ‘polarized’ and ‘impossible’: ‘if you disagree with her you are hated, even if you are a sister. If you are a brother you are loved, even when you attack the state’ (2012, 241). Antigone sacrifices everything to bury her brother, but for her sister she often has disdain. Goldhill’s observations can be applied to Deraspe’s adaptation, in which Antigone’s treatment of different family members is also antithetical. Antigone goes to great lengths to support her brother, Polynices, taking his place in prison, rejecting her chance of citizenship, and squandering her academic potential, in spite of the fact that he is far from innocent: his drug-dealing resulted in a child going into cardiac arrest and dying. Yet, at the film’s close, she has no sympathy for the sister who has been front and centre in the court for every one of her trials, only criticism: Antigone cannot condone or support Ismene’s view because her sister’s desire to fit in is completely alien to her.

The tragedy in the film is that Antigone’s greatest wish is to hold her family together — ‘keep us united’, she asks in the film’s opening, as her household members say prayers before eating. Her family, however, ends up cleaving, losing not only Eteocles but also Ismene. The final shots of the film seem to show Antigone, accompanied by immigration police, going through an airport, leaving Canada. As she walks, she sees her younger self, first arriving in Canada with her grandma, her two brothers, and her sister; now, on the unexpected return journey, only her grandma and one sibling (Polynices) travel alongside her. Unlike Sophocles’ play, the film does not end with a large body-count, but it still has a profound sense of loss and of a family fractured.

Deraspe’s adaptation, in contrast to Sophocles’ play, focuses more on the relationship between Antigone and Haemon and gives Haemon more agency. In the ancient play, Haemon tells Creon that ‘for me it is possible to hear undercover this, how the city is lamenting for this girl’ (692–3); in Deraspe’s version, Haemon does not merely observe citizens supporting Antigone — he actively makes them side with her. He drops out of school to fight for Antigone and gather support; he covers Montreal in graffiti of her face and the slogan ‘Mon coeur me dit’, which people then wear on t-shirts; he disrupts her trial by bringing along other teenagers and arranging for their phones to go off simultaneously; in another judicial proceeding, he is escorted from the court for repeatedly shouting that it is unjust for Antigone to be locked up when the police shot her brother. Haemon has an argument with his father in which Christian asserts that Haemon talks like a kid, to which Haemon replies that the old should listen to the young. This directly recalls Creon and Haemon’s charged discussion in Sophocles’ play: Creon asks, ‘So men of my age are to be taught sense by a man of your age?’ and Haemon replies, ‘If I am young, one must not consider my age rather than my merits’ (726–729). However, Deraspe’s Creon-figure is ultimately more accommodating and willing to relent than Sophocles’ one.

Deraspe’s ‘Antigone’ is striking, powerful and relevant. It encourages and challenges us to reflect on the position and treatment of immigrants in contemporary society. This is an Antigone whose family is threatened with deportation to the homeland that saw her parents murdered; an Antigone whose siblings pray, laugh and dance together before being broken apart by the police’s actions; an Antigone who is amazed by Haemon’s spacious and affluent house and whose grandma is embarrassed at the humbleness of their own; an Antigone who would give up her bright future and return to a horrifying past out of loyalty and love.

Bibliography

Notes: All translations are those of Lloyd-Jones. The language of Deraspe’s ‘Antigone’ is French; I have used the subtitles from the December 2019 screening of the film at the Cinéma du Musée in Montreal.

Daigal, M. [Producer] & Deraspe, S. [Director]. (2019). Antigone.[Motion Picture]. Canada: Maison 4:3.

Goldhill, S. (2012). Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sophocles Antigone; ed. & tr. Gibbons, R. & Segal, C. (2003). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sophocles Antigone; tr. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1994). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

For an interview with Sophie Deraspe about her adaptation, please see the following link: https://montrealgazette.com/entertainment/local-arts/from-greek-tragedy-to-bill-21-quebec-film-antigone-bridges-millenniums.

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