Medea is something of a relief in that it asserts an ideological dimension whose willed abandonment has rendered the trilogy a charming exercise in fausse naïveté. In this five-year-old work, Pasolini is still conceding a social dimension to his elected myths: not, in this instance, an imaginative world "earthy, frolicsome, crowded with people and full of light" (his description of Decameron) but a stark confrontation between cultures sacred and profane, agrarian and bourgeois, 'epical-religious' and 'Western-pragmatic'…. On a formal level, Pasolini is refining a style evident in much of his previous work, but especially in Oedipus. Slow pans across palace walls and expectant lines of men; the blank, immobile scrutiny of an unchanging scene; set-ups which enclose the same piece of reality in two successively closer shots. The allegorical complexities of Theorem and Pigsty are eschewed, as are the evasive simplifications of the films to follow; balanced...