Emotion in A Dream of Passion and Medea
In A Dream of Passion, the director and the lead actress, Maya, embody two contrasting interpretations of Medea, which extend to broader debates about the essence of performance and the role of art. These differences are given prominence in the film through scenes with some of the clearest English dialogue and longest exchanges. The director critiques Maya’s portrayal of Medea, accusing her of reducing the character to a political speech. “What happened to Medea? Lost halfway along the way, but as a political speech, Bravo” (9:22–9:30), he remarks, dismissing Maya’s focus on politics. For the director, Medea is defined by her raw emotion—”half pain, half passion”—and her femininity, which he associates with love, passion, witchcraft, and sex (9:40). He argues that emphasizing politics strips Medea of her essence, “eliminates herself” and “reduce the play to contemporary events”.To him, Medea transcends politics; it is about evoking universal emotions that endure through the ages, a hallmark of what he considers “high art”. This is perhaps especially relevant, as his job is to put on Medea for a modern audience, and emotions are generally seen as universal, and therefore universally touching.
On the other side, Maya interprets Medea as a logical and politically astute figure, capable of strategic action in her own interest: “The objective of the scene is a fallen Medea tries to make the women of Corinth her allies” (9:32-38). Maya also thinks of Medea’s portrayal as a symbol of the suffering and “resistance” of women, and emotion is just a vehicle for that: “Medea’s passion and pain brings her closer to other women”. Maya’s declaration, “It’s the 1970s” underscores her belief that framing Medea as a political figure makes her relevant to modern audiences. In this portrayal, Medea becomes a symbol, paradoxically, of the emotion of resistance.
Brenda’s story shows the fusion of both ideas of emotion. Brenda insists she was not “mad” when she killed her children, citing her practical decision to return her son’s shoes for money beforehand as evidence of her rationality. Yet her method of punishing her husband is deeply emotional: she does not harm him or his mistress but instead seeks to haunt him with guilt and the memory of their children: “Every time you want to fuck her...you will see the children” “My only regret is that she cannot see my three children in blood”. Read with Medea the play, this can be interpreted as how under patriarchy women, emotion is often the only weapon of aggression that women have. For instance, when the director challenges Maya’s interpretation at 14:26, she tries to get her way by acting catty and unreasonable. Brenda’s deep religiousness and the fact that she only quoted the bible in court also shows that religion is often the only source of legitimacy that women can find for punishment.
However, Brenda’s story also reveals the limitations of modernizing Medea politically. In a contemporary context, the act of killing her children serves purely as an emotional punishment for a father who cares about his offspring. In ancient Greece, by contrast, such an act carried a spiritual and societal significance tied to the importance of heirs.
The film’s layered structure—its “Matryoshka doll” narrative—also explores power dynamics in performance. The director, from a patriarchal position of authority, imposes his vision of Medea as an emotional figure. Maya, leveraging her fame, appropriates Brenda’s deeply personal story to enhance her portrayal. Those who have the power to put on a performance to an audience are in a position of power. Following this line of thought, from a linguistic and postcolonial perspective, the film further complicates these dynamics: although the cast of Medea is non-Greek, they dominate the interpretation of an ancient Greek story, relegating modern Greek culture to the background. This mirrors a broader trend in retellings of classical Greece, where its ancient culture is celebrated as a symbol of Western civilization, often at the expense of acknowledging contemporary Greek realities. In this way, A Dream of Passion not only interrogates the tension between emotion and politics but also critiques how real-life cultures and emotions are often buried beneath layers of symbolism and abstraction.
