‘The Return’ Review: Uberto Pasolini’s Minimalist Retelling of Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’

Pasolini leverages little in the way of words to tell his version of the story.

The Return
Photo: Bleecker Street

Uberto Pasolini adapts epic poetry on an intimate scale in The Return, which loosely transposes the second half of Homer’s The Odyssey for the screen. Gone are the gods and monsters, or anything of a mythological bent, in this interpretation of Odysseus’s decades-in-the-making voyage home to Ithaca. Pasolini reduces the scale without minimizing the stakes of a husband, father, and warrior who must come to terms with small but mighty forces, from the ravages of age to the unyielding passage of time.

For a film based on one of the oldest works of literature, Pasolini leverages little in the way of words to tell his version of the story. Rather than relying on verse to have us learn about the characters’ responses to various developments, The Return often turns to its actors to convey or process information in close-ups. When talents like Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche sign on to play Odysseus and Penelope, that’s not a problem for storytelling. However, the impulse to scrub the film of any obvious grandiloquence drives the film toward spells of monotony.

Most interestingly, Fiennes’s grounded approach to Odysseus approximates the BCE equivalent of a veteran’s PTSD. Given that the actor is best known for portraying villains both real (Amon Gth of Schindler’s List) and imagined (Lord Voldemort of the Harry Potter series), it’s riveting to watch him not take the assumed stature of one of literature’s earliest heroes for granted. As a stolid, weary Odysseus mulls the merits of waging any more brawls as he tries to reach his desired destination, Fiennes consistently foregrounds the man’s hurt over his hubris.

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Across Odysseus’s journey, he faces down foes—all of whom look like they wandered off a Men’s Health shoot—who emphasize how power at the time of The Return is merely a product of pure physical prowess. And Pasolini undercuts any notions of honor in battle by repeatedly emphasizing how quickly the exertion of brute force overcomes any notions of nobility.

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Those Bronze Age conceptions of masculinity prove more suffocating for Telemachus (Charlie Plummer), Odysseus’s son, who can’t quite measure up to the strapping suitors vying for the throne in Ithaca. Plummer wrings exquisite tension from the character’s impossible dilemma, which Pasolini’s film finds as an ancient incarnation of prolonged adolescence. On the one hand, he needs Penelope (Binoche) to continue her sly subterfuge that keeps the hope of his father’s restoration alive. But so long as his stature derives solely from his mother, he faces torment from other men who dare him to demonstrate his worthiness to lead.

Even as those conflicts come to a head in a climactic showdown for Penelope’s hand, The Return spurns the scale and style of a sword-and-sandal epic. Pasolini doesn’t construct the stakes of the fight for dominance over Ithaca through overwhelming scope. Instead, the protracted sequence gathers slow-moving power through the accumulation of details, such as how Odysseus and Telemachus differ in dealing with the blood splattered across their faces. The emphasis on silence and stillness over shock-and-awe combat grows a bit belabored, but it works as an extension of the film’s thematic interests in aestheticizing an arena showdown.

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Yet it’s a shared scene between Fiennes and Binoche as The Return draws to a close that lingers more than the aforementioned clash between competitors. As Odysseus and Penelope engage in a psychologically charged tête-à-tête, they tentatively come to agree that marriage forms a shared experience—even if only one member of such a union endured certain travails. This truce between the estranged couple provides a nifty summation of the power inherent in the type of oral tradition that produced The Odyssey. Persuasive stories can provide the foundation for a collective unconscious superseding reality itself.

This potent moment also relies on, as much as anything, the metatextual knowledge that Fiennes and Binoche are reuniting on screen for the first time since 1996’s The English Patient. Pasolini may resist turning to the Homeric text for larger-than-life figures, though he’s not above relying on silver-screen star power for additional impact. Unleashing the full reign of their power to emote through dialogue, not just their expressive visages, highlights a gap in the film’s conception of how to make these characters lifelike. The Return may render its mythological figures lifelike through flesh and blood, but nowhere inside that viscera lies a beating heart.

Score: 
 Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Charlie Plummer, Marwan Kenzari, Claudio Santamaria, ngela Molina  Director: Uberto Pasolini  Screenwriter: John Collee, Edward Bond, Uberto Pasolini  Distributor: Bleecker Street  Running Time: 116 min  Rating: R  Year: 2024  Buy: Video

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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