The film takes its title and mythology from Chaucer’s important 14th century poem ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, a retelling of a ‘faux’ Greek myth with Medieval origins, in which the main protagonist Troilus falls in love with Trojan Cressida who finally deceives and leaves him for the Greek soldier Diomedes. The narrator of ‘As True As Troilus’ (just as Chaucer’s narrator) uses this myth to explore his own romantic mythology, using the characters and their situation to recount his own plight, illustrating the destruction of his own failed relationship with tableaux from the Trojan tale. ‘Unflinchingly wrestling with denial, As True As Troilus combines two antithetical energies : elucidation that expounds upon the complex afflicting Troilus, and enchantment that champions over lucidity in order to access a full experience, deeper than any rational knowledge. The film finds its answer in an overwhelming radiance: images that radiate clarity, visceral logic, symbolic readability, and graphic splendour unfurling in symmetry and duplication. From the onset Jayne Amara Ross retraces denial to its source, death, defining the pathologies of obsession, addiction and monomania. As fugitive passengers in free-fall through time, we reinvent passion, heroism, adventure, or even a tragic destiny, all in order to repress our ineluctable end. Following in the tradition of great cinematic mythographers Jean Cocteau, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, Etant Donnés but also David Lynch in Eraserhead, Jayne Amara Ross reworks the traditional iconography of the Fates and weaves an astonishing portrayal of the human condition. As True As Troilus is endowed with a poetic fullness, as assured in the (visual, written, musical) images themselves as Troilus is confident in Cressida.’ Nicole Brenez
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