The Return review – Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes bring fierce class to elemental Odyssey adaptation
The film world is on tenterhooks for Christopher Nolan's forthcoming Imax-epic treatment of Homer's Odyssey, but Uberto Pasolini's fierce, raw drama of the poem's final sections, describing Odysseus's traumatised return to Ithaca after the sack of Troy, may well give Nolan something to live up to. Pasolini collaborated on the script with screenwriter John Collee, evidently developed from a draft playwright Edward Bond wrote in the 90s; among other things, this film deserves attention as the final work from Bond (who died in 2024).
The Return is an elementally violent movie about PTSD, survivor guilt, abandonment, Freudian dysfunction and ruined masculinity. Juliette Binoche is the deserted queen Penelope, enigmatically reserving her opinions and dignity, refusing to believe the absent king is dead and declining to remarry as the island descends into lawlessness without a clear successor. Ralph Fiennes is Odysseus, enigmatically washed ashore semi-conscious in a way we associate in fact with late Shakespeare rather than Homer; he is reluctant to reveal himself, maybe through shame at having not returned before, at returning now in chaotic poverty and isolation and overwhelmed with his secret knowledge that the glories of war are a shameful delusion.
Burdened with this terrible conviction, Odyssey infiltrates the squalid court in the Christ-like imposture of a tramp, though he has a pretty buff physique like a sunburnt, weather-beaten version of Leonardo's Vitruvian man. Charlie Plummer is Odysseus's angry and conflicted son Telemachus and Marwan Kenzari is Penelope's suitor Antinous. The movie is interestingly like one of the classical adaptations by Pasolini's un-related namesake Pier Paolo Pasolini (he is in fact the nephew of Luchino Visconti), a film like Pasolini's Medea or Oedipus; often, interestingly, it has the crowd-pleasing energy of Ridley Scott's Gladiator films. There is real sinew here.
The Return is in UK and Irish cinemas from 11 April, and in Australian cinemas now.
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