24/10/2024 - Uberto Pasolini brings Homer’s Odyssey to the big screen as the story of a family separated by war who reunites after many years apart

A man returns home after many years of absence, bringing with him the traumas of war and the weight of a big failure. His wife has been waiting for him without ever losing hope of seeing him alive. His son must deal with this unexpected return, while looking for his place in the world. It seems like a story of today, yet it was written 3,000 years ago – it is none other than Homer’s Odyssey, as told by Uberto Pasolini in his new film, The Return [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which, after its world premiere in the Gala section of the Toronto International Film Festival last September, has landed at the 19th Rome Film Fest, where it was projected in the Grand Public section.

The director of profound and moving films such as Still Life [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Uberto Pasolini
film profile] (Orizzonti award for Best Directing at Venice 2013) and Nowhere Special [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Uberto Pasolini
film profile] (also in the Orizzonti section in Venice) here focuses on the most intimate aspect of one of the most important and foundational works in the history of world literature, and transforms it into a sort of contemporary noir film that digs into its characters’ psychology, while maintaining the original era, settings and costumes. It also reunites a couple of high level actors, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche who, together again for the first time since The English Patient (1996), communicate all the expressive power of this ageless story.

The Odyssey had not been adapted for the screen in 70 years, since Ulysses starring Kirk Douglas and Vilvana Mangano. Unlike the version directed by Mario Camerini, in Pasolini’s version there is no trip, no Polyphemus, and no mermaids. There is only the return to Ithaca, and only an exhausted man who lands on a beach, overwhelmed with feelings of guilt for not having brought his soldiers home and who, for that reason, prefers to hide, while his wife Penelope continues to weave her cloth by day and undo it by night, to postpone to infinity her choice of a new husband.

It must be said that Binoche here is at her best, embodying Penelope’s suffering in a profound, almost tangible way – the suffering of a woman abandoned and alone, imprisoned in a castle, a queen who resists the pressures and the desires of the pretenders to the throne, proud and austere yet always sensual. Fiennes is extraordinarily intense as a dirty, emaciated, shabby Odysseus, a man marked by the horrors of war, in shock – a mortified father, rejected by his son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) and who will have to fight against the Proci and his own ghosts, to save the unity of his family. Pasolini’s is an interior Odyssey, which interrogates the meaning of war – that of tomorrow as well as that of today – and talks about human relationships, love and healing.

The Return is a co-production between Italy, Greece, the United Kingdom, and France and was shot in Corfu. It was produced by Picomedia with Rai Cinema, Heretic, Redwave Films, Ithaca Films Limited, Kabo Films, Marvelous Productions, in association with the Greek Film Centre ERT SA and the BFI’s UK Global Screen Fund. It will be released in Italian theatres on 30 January by 01 Distribution. International distribution is handled by Hanway Films.

(Translated from Italian)