While we wait to see Homer’s Odyssey as a big-budget Christopher Nolan blockbuster, Italian producer-director Uberto Pasolini brings us the low-budget, character-piece version. Rather than trying to mount a vast, effects-packed naval adventure featuring gods and monsters, Pasolini sticks to location-based terra firma, and focuses his narrative on the grizzled protagonist’s homecoming.
The Return opens with Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) washing up on a beach, and relies on good old-fashioned dialogue and performance to do the dramatic heavy lifting. There’s no reference to Odysseus’ adventures since leaving Troy — no recounted tales of sirens, the cyclops, or divine meddling. Here, we’re on the human level of psychology and emotion, making this a thoroughly modern, if relatively mundane, interpretation.
Ralph Fiennes is unsettlingly compelling as the broken hero.
On one side of the story we have Juliette Binoche as Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, wrestling with a kind of grief as she refuses to accept her husband’s presumed death and puts off increasingly threatening demands to choose a new spouse. Her scenes are mostly interior, thick with shadow, as she drifts mournfully around her household, witnessing its moral disintegration while toxic masculinity takes hold and her son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) becomes a target. There’s an inherent repetitiveness to the Penelope strand, given its rhythmic attention to the shroud she’s weaving — and, by night, unpicking, to delay its completion (which she’s previously promised will mark the moment of her new-husband selection). But while it slows the pace, this feels appropriate; it conveys a sense of a life wilfully held in stasis.
Meanwhile, the film’s other half concerns Odysseus: bronzed, scarred and scraggily hirsute. He stalks the island as a beggar, torn between PTSD-driven shame at his Trojan war crimes (where others marvel at his big-horse wheeze, his mind is mired in the slaughter that followed) and his sense of responsibility to family and kingdom, both equally jeopardised by his long absence. Fiennes is unsettlingly compelling as the broken hero, suggesting echoes of Clint Eastwood’s similarly mythic gunslinger in Unforgiven: a man whose inability to escape his violent past makes for a very bloody present.
This pays off when he and Binoche (in their third collab, following Wuthering Heights and The English Patient) come together for the bow-and-axes finale, and Odysseus fully lets rip. Though the tone here is by no means triumphal — The Return is far too thoughtful to pitch its hacks and slashes as entertainment. So, while Pasolini’s film lacks visual flair and is sadly hampered by some stilted supporting performances, it is at least a refreshingly grown-up and grounded take on swords and sandals.
