The Return 2024 Film Review
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There are no sirens, no cyclops, no six-headed monsters in Uberto Pasolini's adaptation of The Odyssey. His film The Return largely omits the high-sea adventure from Homer's epic poem, which Kirk Douglas adapted into a 1955 version of Ulysses. Stream this movie on flix free movies.
Instead, Pasolini's handsome, earnest, thoughtful film focuses on the faces of Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche. The camera loves them. She rarely lets them go, watching the light of a setting sun or the crackling fire sliding over tired brows and sullen cheeks, or the picturesque rings of smoke circling like thrones around their heads.
I could stare at her for hours. Especially Binoche. Her presentation is terse. But she holds long silences as if to bend to her own whims, and she gives her best performance in a film that often feels like an endurance test.
Fiennes and Binoche, the reunited couple from The English Patient, play long-lost lovers Odysseus and Penelope, waiting patiently in caves and grottos, engaging in emotional labor until they are reunited. In Pasolini's hands, The Martian becomes a homecoming tale about the struggle with PTSD. Maybe she always was. Fiennes' Odysseus spends much of the film relegated to the sidelines, scarred by battle, physically, emotionally and mentally, too changed to bear to face his wife. Meanwhile, Penelope has been waiting decades for her husband to return to Ithaca, and must grapple with how much of herself remains, if he does return. This resurrection is a heroic act by Pasolini, who wants to remind us that these classic Greek letters and their texts are timeless. And not just when you can stick a Marvel logo on your back. But his narrative restraint is too admirable. Releasing nearly two-thirds of a tale and chapters of gods and monsters is great, but the void is filled by nothing more than two magnetic leads and consistently gorgeous cinematography. “The Return” is beautiful to look at, but it’s not enough.
The film begins with Fiennes’ Odysseus stranded on Ithaca, the rustic island where he once ruled as king. He returns from a stormy sea, naked, bruised and wracked by guilt that none of his troops survived the journey home from the Trojan War. With his head constantly bowed, he plays out Odysseus’ anguish over his lost soldiers, his barely audible words drowned out by earnest, whispered voices. It's as if he refuses to control his own voice because of the way he has acted in the past. Odysseus spends much of the film hiding in the shadows, witnessing the destruction of his home and family as if it were a punishment he deserves, while his wife, Queen Penelope, and her young son must defend the throne from seizure.
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