The Return review – skirts on the am-dram

This sto­ry of a rum­pled beg­gar­man who wash­es up at sea and even­tu­al­ly trans­forms into some­one who looks to be shoot­ing their shot at a local body­build­ing expo is the type of screen vehi­cle you’d expect to see Jean Claude van Damme leap­ing on in the 1990s. Yet Uber­to Pasolini’s The Return is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, as you have arch thesp Ralph Fiennes as that beg­gar­man, very much prov­ing that he can get ripped to order. Plus, this is a sto­ry adapt­ed from ele­ments of Homer’s anti­quar­i­an page-turn­er, ​‘The Odyssey’, the scholas­tic stan­dard text that even Christo­pher Nolan is now tak­ing a hoof at.

Ear­ly reviews of the film from its pre­mière at the 2024 Toron­to Film Fes­ti­val have com­pared its patient dra­matur­gy and line-read­ings to Shake­speare in tone and mood, and you can imag­ine how that leap is being made with the Bard’s favourite son in the lead role. And yet, there’s some­thing quite free and pure about this adap­ta­tion, with an unblink­ing, era-spe­cif­ic treat­ment of the male form which echoes films like Derek Jarman’s exper­i­men­tal Bib­li­cal saga, Sebas­tiane.

Fiennes is Odysseus, the once-mighty war­rior who fought in the Tro­jan War and who now finds him­self in his home­land of Itha­ca after 20 years away. His wife and queen Pene­lope (Juli­ette Binoche) sits in her clois­ter, fran­ti­cal­ly weav­ing on her loom, all the bet­ter to deal with the fact she’s being con­stant­ly hec­tored by nobles, politi­cians and local strong­men to take a new hus­band and allow male pow­er to rule the roost once more. Yet rather than dive right back into the fray to re-claim his throne, Odysseus hangs back to get a mea­sure of things, and first rekin­dles a rela­tion­ship with his estranged son Telemachus (Char­lie Plum­mer), cir­cling his prey before being hand­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty for poet­ic and bru­tal retribution.

The first hour of the film lays out the sociopo­lit­i­cal con­text in a way that’s not mas­sive­ly excit­ing from a dra­mat­ic van­tage, with lots of har­ried con­ver­sa­tions occur­ring in leafy wood­land clear­ings. Yet as the focus shifts onto Fiennes, mat­ters begin to heat up, reach­ing a fiery pin­na­cle when he and Binoche final­ly share the frame. Some of the heinous thugs are a lit­tle one-note, and Plum­mer real­ly does not work in this role, par­tic­u­lar­ly when he’s scene part­ner with his gen­er­al­ly more impos­ing co-stars.

Yet from its slow build-up comes a rous­ing finale, with Pene­lope set­ting an impos­si­ble feat of strength and agili­ty as the bench­mark for her new mar­riage mate­r­i­al (as it should be!). Pasoli­ni has made a name for him­self as a mak­er of sol­id, if not-quite-excep­tion­al social real­ist dra­mas, such as 2013’s Still Life and 2020’s Nowhere Spe­cial, and this one proves that there’s def­i­nite­ly anoth­er string to his bow in terms of his inter­ests and abil­i­ties as a screen storyteller.