By the way, I know Armand Assante, who was so brilliant as Odysseus in Andrei Konchalovsky's greatest film; he used to be a frequent visitor to our parts, and one could simply walk up to him in a bar and chat in broken English

By the way, I know Armand Assante, who was so brilliant as Odysseus in Andrei Konchalovsky's greatest film; he used to be a frequent visitor to our parts, and one could simply walk up to him in a bar and chat in broken English. These days, though, this actor, admittedly not much to write home about in the rest of his work, typecast as policeman, gangster and detective, looks rather more like a bronze statuette of Odysseus than the king of Ithaca himself, though he remains perfectly agreeable in purely human terms.

As for Konchalovsky's two-part Odyssey of 1997, it is my favourite film of all time. Besides a cast brilliantly chosen for type, the staging itself, the effects and the dramaturgy, it stays quite close to the text with a minimum of departures, even if from a rather abridged version of the poem. A must-see!