Director – Uberto Pasolini – 2024 – Italy, Greece, UK, France – Cert. 15 – 116m
**
Odysseus returns home to his island kingdom of Ithaca ten years after the Trojan War to find faithful wife Penelope fending off insistent suitors who threaten to kill son Telemachus – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 11th
A young man (Charlie Plummer) stares out on clear blue Mediterranean waters crashing against the shore’s rocks. In an interior, an older woman (Juliette Binoche) weaves at her shuttle. On a beach, unobserved, the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwreck wash up, as does the unconscious body of a man (Ralph Fiennes). In the local village, a man threatens the young man with a knife.
Under pressure to marry one of the men in the village – her husband Odysseus, the island’s king, never having returned from the Trojan War – Penelope (for the woman played here by Binoche is she) claims she will do so once she has finished weaving her grandfather’s shroud. She is accused of having been weaving it for months.
The Fiennes character is rescued from the sea by a boat, only for crew members to throw him back into the sea. Later, half-dead and crawling along the beach, he is found by a local pig farmer (Claudio Santamaria from Bond movie Casino Royale, Martin Campbell, 2006; Beseiged, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1998) who puts a poultice on his wounds and nurses him back to health. Penelope wanders tunnels in which various people can be glimpsed in various sexual assignations (this is nothing like as much fun to watch as it might sound). Fiennes, meanwhile, is told that the island has no king – he left years ago and took all the best men with him.
Telemachus is desperate to know whether or not his father is alive. Fiennes, a Trojan War veteran, recounts the story of the Horse of Troy, recalling the realisation that the city of Tory could never be won, only destroyed. He expresses similar such sentiments throughout the film: on some level he is a broken man. There are increasing hints that Fiennes’ character is in fact Odysseus himself, that he was so ashamed at the thought of returning home without any of the men who had left with him that he never bothered to come back. If he really is Odysseus, though, he must look very different now because no-one seems to recognise him.
This is one of those films where you’re constantly struggling to work out what the names of many of the characters are. Eventually you work out that the one (sort of) sympathetic suitor played by Marwan Kenzari (from Aladdin, Guy Ritchie, 2019), for whom at one point Penelope held a torch (or perhaps didn’t) is named Antinous while the pig farmer who helps Ralph Fiennes is Eumaeus.
Since the film is being touted as an adaptation of the closing parts of the Odyssey, it’s scarcely a spoiler to reveal that the Fiennes character eventually outs himself as Odysseus, and there’s a big (all right, it’s not really that big) fight at the end in one of the caves / anterooms of the palace in which the now revealed Odysseus (Fiennes) must fight challengers for the hand of Penelope after being the only person to meet her challenge of stringing Odysseus’ bow and shooting an arrow through 12 specially lined-up axeheads. This sounds like it ought to be exciting, but by this point, frankly, you’re unlikely to care.
The film ought to be easy enough to sell, on the strength of the pairing of Fiennes and Binoche who previously appeared together very effectively in The English Patient (Antony MInghella, 1996). They were also in the less memorable Wuthering Heights (Peter Kosminsky, 1992), but that isn’t being stressed. Both are terrific actors, but director Pasolini doesn’t seem to know how to extract great performances from them (I can think of a number of films in which whichever one of them appears is terrific). Charlie Plummer is distinctly underwhelming as Telemachus, while the remainder of the cast feel like they’ve wandered in from Greek or Italian B-movies.
The one strong asset this possesses is a genuinely epic score by Rachel Portman (formerly the director’s wife), but sadly this alone isn’t enough to save it.
It might so easily have been very good, but, in the end, this is a major disappointment.
The Return is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, April 11th.
Trailer: