What if the sirens didn't sing?

Reading Homer, and listening to the legends that we have been exchanging from mouth to mouth, from ear to ear, from drawing to drawing, from story to story, from story to story, or from man to man, he gives an account of it.

One of the most wonderful examples is the Odyssey of the great Milo Manara, which Lumen Publishing House has published this July, which is about to end.

It appears to be an event, which no one would doubt, which is stuck in our imaginary, which has been told before the Bronze Age, and which those who will survive after the Apocalypse will murmur by the fire (there is a fire in that dystopian world): Once upon a time there were sea-creatures, with a head and a torso like a woman's, and the rest in the shape of fish or birds.

Christopher Nolan, in his unbounded feat of The Odyssey , tells us the story in a classic way. The men of Ulysses' crew cover their ears with wax so as not to hear the song. Penelope's husband will be tied to the mast with hard ropes, tempted not to go to the fantastic creatures called Thelxiepeia, Molpe, Aglaophonos, Peisinoë, Ligeia, or Teles.

But the heroes of the Ulysses brand, proud, always ready to face all dangers, wanted to hear those songs. In the film, as in so many cartoons seen as children , we are witnesses to the terrible suffering of Uilises. Suffering or inexplicable pleasure? Who knows?

But Franz Kafka turned the fable, the parable, around the millennial legend, and turned our fixed belief upside down. Theauthor of the metamorphosis proposes to us defiantly: "Silence!"

It was against this silence that those who were responsible for the music of the film, led by three Oscar winners, Ludwig Göransson, born in Sweden, had to fight (or leave). They made firm, irrevocable decisions.

The second, third, fourth, drifting choice. The then and local amphora, the musical instruments seen in the fleet, would be revived by the magnificent luthiers. For example, the Lira?

Ludwig Göransson wanted a lot of gong. As the age was bronze, they used bronze to summon people in the agora and in the palaces.

It was decided by the musicians that the sound that would leave the viewer with his mouth full and his ears full would be produced by playing metals of various kinds....

However, like Ulysses, we don't hear the song of the sea sheets in the terrible darkness of the movie theater, because that's what Kafka told us, that's what Ludwig chose.