07 · 28 · 26

NOSTOS: THE RETURN by Franco Piavoli: another Odyssey

Alonso Díaz de la Vega

The most recent release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) reignited the long-standing debate that has persisted since the dawn of cinema: Can literature truly be transposed into images on screen through an adaptation process? The easiest answer would be yes—that it’s just a matter of translating the actions described in words into the actors’ interpretations, and that’s it; just like that, two narratives become one! However, truth be told, we would be holding on to nothing but an illusion. According to Leibniz’s law, two separate objects are identical if they share the exact same properties; in this way, not even by transcribing each word and comma from a text could we possibly obtain the exact same text. After all, we call a copy a copy for a reason!

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story that acts simultaneously as a satire of the excesses into which we critics fall, but also as a subtle reminder that two texts identical in form are, in fact, not the same text. In the short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” the eponymous author—discussed throughout an essay written by the narrator—transcribes Cervantes’s masterpiece by copying out even the punctuation; nevertheless, in the analyst’s view, they are not, in essence, the same book. Both were written under completely different circumstances and, considering that context belongs to the properties of objects, the author of the analysis arrives at the apparently absurd conclusion that Menard’s version is not a mere copy, but an entirely different text. Yet Borges’s humor should not be overlooked when he compares two identical sentences and discovers in them nearly opposite qualities; however, from a metaphysical perspective, it is undeniable that the two novels are not identical, since they were conceived in different times and with different intentions and wills.

We have no way of knowing whether the Italian director Franco Piavoli had all this in mind when he made his adaptation of The Odyssey or not (one of the few sources we have that shed light on his train of thought is a video interview with the US-American filmmaker Henry Jaglom, where Piavoli says nothing about it); however, the way in which the film was produced suggests a creative process that leaned toward a deliberate distinction between the poem and its translation into images, between literary and cinematic language. We become aware of it from the moment we read the title of the film:  Nostos: The Return (Nostos: Il ritorno, 1989). There is a clear distance that the director takes from the title Homer originally gave to his epic poem by adopting, more fittingly, the name of his theme: nostos (in Ancient Greek it is a concept that evokes the long journey back home). Piavoli shapes the film in decidedly cinematic ways, perhaps motivated by his desire to depict the distinction between the visual and the textual universe, which, incidentally, has become not just inevitable, but rather a fully deliberate choice.

The director seizes the opportunity to accentuate this difference through the creation of a language spoken in the film. At the beginning, an intertitle appears with the following words: “The film’s dialogue is inspired by sounds of ancient Mediterranean languages.” That is to say, what we are about to hear in the movie is not even Homeric Greek, but a fictional language that mirrors the antiquity and fantasy of what appears on screen, as well as a deliberate indifference to the meaning of words. In the best of cases, we are capable of recognizing some key names, such as “mother” and “Penelope”; nevertheless, the voice-overs remain unintelligible because, after all, Piavoli does not seek to narrate: it is taken for granted that whoever is watching this film surely knows what The Odyssey is about. What Nostos achieves is to place us in Odysseus's position (played by Luigi Mezzanotte) and make us sense, from afar, what a sea voyage might have been like twenty-eight centuries ago. For this very reason, the scenes of physical strength aboard a small boat recall the working bodies of Soviet cinema.

Any other mainstream filmmaker would have his characters verbally express their exhaustion so as to leave no room for doubt, but for Piavoli a mere handful of images suffices to portray not only strength and fatigue, but even the characters' origin, whom we first meet at sea. There are shots that leave to the imagination the brutal sack of Troy and the memories it awakens in the protagonist, as is evident in the shots of the warriors’ helmets, of Odysseus gazing at the horizon, and of corpses appearing in the sea through a cross-fade.

Between his desire for a strictly sensorial film and the limitations of a small production, Piavoli bypasses many of the most classic episodes of the poem. For instance, neither the Cyclops Polyphemus nor the gigantic Laestrygonians—who destroy the small fleet from Ithaca—appear at any point throughout the film. However, Piavoli finds ways to evoke other passages, as seen when he replaces the Scylla and Charybdis attack with a storm that combines images of a turbulent sea on an ominous night with studio-filmed scenes: beneath disproportionate sheets that resemble the sails of a ship, we glimpse the bodies of Odysseus and his warriors so as to suggest Poseidon’s revenge, as though it were an expressionist film.

During Odysseus’s encounter with Calypso (played by Branca de Camargo), the atmosphere becomes delightfully sensual through detailed shots that make us look closely at textures, trees, rivers, luscious fruits, and, of course, the colorful lotus flowers.

These images are crucial because they anticipate the eroticism developed between the warrior king and the nymph, which is purposely shot with plants moving across the frame and the naked bodies. Piavoli is not driven by shyness or discretion, but by a yearning to depict all this entire sensorial universe: the touch of one body upon another signifies the act of dwelling in a partner as well as dwelling in the world, and to receive its various gifts—from nourishment to pleasure.

The photography from Nostos becomes a way of remembering all these textures, arousing certain desire, and engaging more senses than sight. In this way, Piavoli reveals his understanding of cinema as an art form closer to painting than to literature.

The importance of seeing paintings in person does not lie in the almost religious fetishism of witnessing an object handled by a genius (in reality, thinking of artists as gods is ultimately detrimental), but in paying close attention to the textures left by the brushstrokes on the canvas. Thanks to reliefs, we can see even more realistic trees or stones; there are lumps that remind us that we are looking at a mere representation rather than a real object or a photograph. Sad to say, literature does not possess this virtue. Fortunately, cinema does allow us to thoroughly observe the world and experience not only the image or the sensations that things produce in us, but also the time and movement that  immerse us to the point where our consciousness truly believes we are living what we are watching. For this very reason, we get frightened by horror movies, or erotic scenes ignite us: the illusion and magic of cinema is that it makes us forget we are facing a mere image, and not a real situation.

Nostos is an absolute must-see adaptation precisely because it embraces these differences and refuses to be a mere copy-paste of characters, actions, and events described. While on social media the debate keeps heating up about whether Nolan’s Odyssey is loyal to the original poem or not, Piavoli affirms that loyalty plays no role in the discussion, especially when it has to do with the plot. What truly deserves importance is how loyal cinema is to its intrinsic qualities—which, in fact, have taken a back seat nowadays.

Perhaps what we should truly be asking ourselves is: Why is it that movies that stay true to the medium’s capacities are not regarded as equally important? The answer is simply that we have been taught to appreciate cinema as a tool for storytelling rather than for sensory evocation. Clearly, neither of these poles should be excluded, but maybe the greatest era of cinema was when these dichotomies converged: when audiences watched Emilio Fernández’s films for the joy of watching melodrama and landscapes—not only to find out how the love stories and pursuits came to an end—or when they watched Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s, in which monsters were all the more terrifying for their invisibility. At the end of the day, cinema is the image’s territory; narrating is, of course, a valid possibility, but not a requirement. Nostos is one of the most important film adaptations of the Odyssey, or any other literary work, particularly because it succeeds in what only painters such as John William Waterhouse and Arnold Böcklin had set out to do: to translate a poem into images.

Translated by Michelle Olvera