Ralph Fiennes in a scene from The Return.Fabio Zayed/Bleecker Street/Mongrel Media/Supplied
- The Return
- Directed by Uberto Pasolini, based on Homer’s Odyssey
- Starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Charlie Plummer
- Classification 116 minutes. Rated R
- In theatres Dec. 6
What if what we valorize has been wrong all along? That’s the question co-writer and director Uberto Pasolini asks in The Return, based on Emily Wilson’s fleet translation of Homer’s Odyssey. After 10 years fighting the Trojan War, King Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) returns to Ithaca not as a conquering hero with laurels strewn at his feet, but as a bruised soul crawling from the sea. “The people were starving, desperate for peace,” he rasps. “The city could never be won, only destroyed. We burned it to the ground and drowned the flames in blood.”
In The Return, Juliette Binoche’s beauty has steeliness, mystery, and sorrow
Meanwhile Penelope (Juliette Binoche), his wife the queen, has been bearing the load of all women whose men wage war, weaving and unweaving the same cloth for a decade, fending off suitors and raising their son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer). Wracked with guilt and fearing for his life, Odysseus approaches Penelope in disguise; angry and sorrowful, she plays along. “Did my husband rape? Did he murder women and children?” she asks. “The man who left would never have stayed away.” Which is Pasolini’s point: after so much carnage, Odysseus is not the same man who left. And with his return, more will die.
Shot in Corfu and the Peloponnese, The Return is a stripped-down, rugged take on the epic poem, all caves and firelight, mud and sackcloth. Fiennes plays Odysseus as a wraith with haunted eyes, and Binoche uses silence to convey Penelope’s icy anger. Though the king does eventually string his mighty bow and shoot an arrow through a dozen axe heads, there’s no thrill of victory, only the agony of fresh bloodshed. Though the stately pace can be frustrating, its anti-war stance ultimately feels modern and urgent. Near the end, Penelope delivers three lines that offer a way forward after any war: “We will remember,” she says. “Then we will forget. Then we will live.”
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