Swanvale Halt Film Club: Fall of an Empire (AKA Katherine of Alexandria) (2014)

Oh dearie, dearie me. Apart from a lapse regarding The Turin Horse, I usually operate on the principle that if you can’t say anything nice you shouldn’t say anything at all. It is very, very hard to say anything nice about this film, which comes across like an extended episode of Xena the Warrior Princess without the laughs. You do get to see some extremely elderly ‘name’ actors like Edward Fox, Joss Ackland and Peter O’Toole who were presumably very cheap due to age, and Steven Berkoff who is just cheap anyway, while beautiful Nicole Keniheart as Katherine (Katarina? they can’t decide what to call her) fascinates by her sheer impassivity. It’s as though the director’s told her, ‘You’re a saint, you’re supposed to be serene’, and as a result she delivers her often gnomically incomprehensible lines with barely a flicker in facial expression throughout the whole 106 minutes. Actually, no, she does have two expressions: alive and dead. She really does look the part, but if only that was enough. And there, so far as criticism goes, we will leave matters.

Of course I watched Fall of an Empire because of the treatment of St Catherine, and, if ambition is in itself laudable, the film is to be lauded for that, anyway. It’s an attempt to take the Catherine story out of pseudo-history and insert it into the realities of the early fourth century. Here, Katherine, a strangely and precociously intellectual Egyptian peasant girl, is seized by loopy Emperor Maxentius and grows up in his palace in Alexandria. In adulthood she sends apparently innocent but in fact incendiary poetry out across the Empire inciting the barbarian peoples to throw off the Roman yoke, a sort of Katniss Everdeen of the mind. Tangled with her protest against imperial power is her rebellion against the Roman gods and the decision of insurgent Emperor Constantine – confusingly her childhood friend and anxiously searching for her – to abandon the old ways too. Of course it’s just as much pseudo-history as the legend it’s re-imagining, but you can see how this actually makes for rather a powerful story: it just all goes wrong in the telling in ways it would be hard to enumerate.

But there is one point where the film achieves a genuinely iconic image; and it’s not the execution on the wheel. Katherine sits before a group of senators dragged in to debate with her, the narrative’s parallel for the legend of her converting the fifty pagan philosophers, propped against a crutch after her ankles have been smashed, a crutch which echoes the cross. Battered, filthy and yet luminous, she calls the gods of Rome ‘mists and fallacies’, lies and liars: that was no more than Homer had said, after all, and with its gods goes all the authority of Rome. Here is a glimpse of what might have been, something genuinely radical and grand. All martyrs, in the end, are rebels against power in the name of a power that is deeper, greater, and more ultimate, and that idea is never less than compelling.