Jessica Yu's previous documentary feature, In the Realms of the Unreal, did a scarily inventive job of fleshing out the fantasy life of the reclusive "outsider artist" Henry Darger and detailing the lonely existence from which Darger had only his imagination as escape. For her next trick, Yu was offered the job of making a film about one of the great shapers of classical tragedy, Euripides. Yu took them up on it, sort of: her new film Protagonist intercuts between four men as each describes part of the major dramatic arc of his life, according to Euripides' chain-reaction formula of "Provocation" followed by "Opportunity", leading to "Doubt", etc. Yu sifted through hundreds of potential candidates before settling on her four stars. As it happens, the final four included her husband, the writer Mark Salzman, who narrates a hilarious account of his adolescent attempt to transform himself into Caine from Kung Fu.
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