By David Ryan.
Aspires to explore important themes about perception and insight from a trauma-focused narrative but is often undone by its own scrimping of dramatic focus and coherence.”
Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024) is a mature but disappointing adaptation of the last few books of Homer’s The Odyssey, centering on the king’s unheralded return to Ithaca after a twenty year absence. Though the story holds interest due to its source material, the film is an emotionally distant and uneven drama of how a queen and king retain their hegemony over their oikos and kingdom by using a calculus of faith, caution, guile, and violence.
When Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) washes ashore on Ithaca, we witness a scarred and weathered king whose vibrancy and strength have been depleted by years of warfare, seafaring, and imprisonment (seven years captive on Calypso’s island—unmentioned in the film). In this trauma narrative, Odysseus has been wounded by battle and tortured by guilt, and his prolonged physical and psychological toll make him quietly cautious about announcing his return.
As he explores his kingdom, Odysseus is deeply troubled by what he sees. In his absence, Ithaca has been destabilized by a phalanx of aristocratic suitors (noble savages of a different sort) who believe the old king is dead, so they occupy his palace, rape and murder some Ithacans, and pressure Queen Penelope (Juliette Binoche) to choose a new king. The queen, however, resists for two reasons: she believes her husband is alive, and, more immediately, she stalls to protect her twenty-something son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) because he is too inexperienced and unwise to claim the throne.
As a primary theme, writer-director Pasolini and co-writers John Collee and Edward Bond dramatize how Bronze Age power is performed, challenged, and, ultimately, maintained. When the film builds on this firm ground, it moves well enough because of its lean dramatic scale. However, there are a few key issues regarding narrative mood, tone, and casting that hamper strengthening the emotional connections to the characters, if not the film.
Sailor, Survivor, Beggar, King
After his rescue by swine herder Eumaes (Claudio Santamaria), Odysseus disguises himself with a beggar’s cloak, rendering him unrecognizable except to his aged but faithful dog and an older nurse who recognizes him from an unusual scar. This sub-theme of disguise and perception speaks to the film’s preoccupation with artifice and authenticity, and these themes illustrate the ethical differences between manipulation and persuasion as they relate to political power and governance.
There are many scenes that play on this theme, suggesting that politically performative variables—such as personal standing, fine clothes, and regal bearing—are used to manipulate, coerce, freeload, and ruthlessly subjugate. By contrast, the film also argues that a deeper kind of relational humanism is created when people use foresight, strategy, and persuasion to establish the importance of evidence, values, and credibility. This latter ethic is crystallized in Penelope, for the most part, who must disguise her intent to stall her suitors while persuading her followers that her husband is still alive.
What is clear from the film is that the most valid ethical arguments are best expressed via long-standing relationships, where trust has been cultivated through the business of trade, homestead servitude, loyal relations, and marriage. We see these persuasive relationships in Eumaes, Eurycleia (Angela Molina), and Penelope, but the antithesis is found in the suitors—those outsiders whose highly masculinized, aristocratic rights are communicated through their gluttony and aggression. Marwan Kenzari’s Antinous, the ringleader, embodies an ambition that informs his manners, a cut throat ethos that includes trying to kill Telemachus. Though there are some aristocrats interested in a peaceful succession, they depart the island while the remaining nobles perform their social offenses in various, villainous degrees.
In the story, the sub-themes of disguise and authenticity build to more important themes focused on perception and insight, relating character issues of sight and blindness to epistemic values of knowledge and truth, particularly for Penelope and Odysseus. For the suitors, however, relying on their class-conscious filters results in their swinish and brutish actions, and because of this folly, they fail to recognize the threat posed by the cloaked Odysseus. Here, the film’s primary political tensions hint at the coming discord between the aristocracy and kingly rule, a discord that ends with an aristocratic triumph in the Hellenic Dark Ages.
Otherwise, Odysseus’s ultimate victory—his slaughter of his unwelcome guests—succeeds because of their inability to see beyond his lowly status until they finally witness the forensic proof of his cunning, strength, and identity—and by then it’s too late. Thereafter, Odysseus and Penelope cautiously reconcile by sharing their hardships, and they work to re-establish harmony in their marriage, household, and kingdom. The film concludes with a tender scene of their negotiation, resolution, and reconciliation.
The Constant but Dislocated Director
For this trauma narrative, these directorial choices illustrate Odysseus’s separateness and dislocation, but these choices come at a cost because they also underscore the film’s problem with regulating its humanism with its failure to engage its audience.”
To tell this dark tale, Pasolini often avoids using conventional directorial and storytelling choices, and this approach has mixed results. For example, when we first see Odysseus awash alone on a rocky beach, Pasolini omits the conventional awakening scene where Odysseus realizes he’s home, and when Odysseus sees Telemachus and Penelope for the first time in separate scenes, these segments communicate a recognizable estrangement, but they also remain emotionally inert by design.
For this trauma narrative, these directorial choices illustrate Odysseus’s separateness and dislocation, but these choices come at a cost because they also underscore the film’s problem with regulating its humanism with its failure to engage its audience. As a narrative choice, the film’s omission of the Olympian gods amplifies its humanistic focus, but the film’s lack of emotional engagement leaves Penelope’s desperation, Telemachus’s anger, and Odysseus’s guilt feeling quite remote, if not mundane. Though the filmmakers effectively illustrate the characters’ emotional distances, these choices also create a great distance between the characters and the audience—weakening the narrative mood.
Compounding this problem is the film’s visual engagement with its subjects. The film oscillates between the perspectives of Telemachus, Penelope, and Odysseus, and the opening sequence, for example, juxtaposes separate shots of Telemachus staring at crashing waves, Penelope weaving at her loom (and looking out a window), and Odysseus lying ashore. This framing does coherently illustrate one family’s collective trauma, and though these story variables jibe with the film’s themes, the effect drives us in different directions, often leading to emotional dead ends.
On the matter of visual engagement, though Pasolini illustrates Odysseus’s body as a fleshly map of pain and suffering, there is little effective sense on Pasolini’s part to strategically map (for the audience) Odysseus’s location and movements in relation to the different homesteads, the palace, and greater Ithaca. There are many scenes of people walking about (and one involving an effective chase), but there is little planned visual consistency in Pasolini’s technical direction regarding the spatial and cinematic geography where we become emotionally invested in the economy of Ithacan topography.
The film also leans towards the stagey rather than the cinematic, with little sense of Ithaca as a lush land ripe for goats, swine, and people because the film’s locations are understatedly shot by cinematographer Marius Panduru. These choices leave little for us to understand why the homeland is so beloved by Eumaes, Penelope, and Odysseus. And these choices veer the film into a stylistic discontinuity in setting Ithaca as a land populated by Bronze Age Greeks bearing the gifts of their varied European-based, English accents, particularly a Poughkeepsie-born Plummer’s English-accented Telemachus, a Hellene who appears more Norse than Ionian.
These stylistic problems begin at the outset when the film’s prologue uses clumsy language to communicate dishonest content. In the prologue, we read: “Her son Telemachus waits for the father he never knew, while restless suitors lay waste [sic] the land and press the queen to choose a new king …” Though an alert line editor would jump to insert “to” to compose “lay waste to the land” to parallel “to choose a new king,” the editor would also have to wrestle with the thematic problem regarding the gluttonous and disrespectful suitors, who do trample on manners and commit crimes, but they do not “lay waste to the land.” Rather, it is Odysseus who wastes the suitors.
To relax our eyes and ease our ears, this part of the prologue could have been written not only to honor active voice but also to more honestly represent the film as well. To wit: Her son, Telemachus, awaits the father he never knew while restless suitors disrupt the land and press the queen to choose a new king.
The King who Came from the Sea, the Face who Came from the Cold
Despite these shortcomings, The Return does offer moments of insight, particularly in its attention to the tactical strategies related to maintaining political power. For instance, Odysseus’s patience, and his ability to observe and assess before acting, compliments Penelope’s steely and strategic resistance. Together, they offer a stark contrast to the fractured, scheming, and impulsive groupthink of the suitors.
Finally, Odysseus’s cloak is both a cover and a test. In Homer’s tale, Athena strategically adorns Odysseus with a divine disguise, and for this reason, few recognize him. Here, his cloak signifies a lowly Mycenean standing, and in this world, clothes are an important signifier of class, moral and political standing, and Olympian favor; however, the film also embodies the Homeric conceit that though clothes (and class) function as tools of identity, they do not define a person’s innate qualities, such as intelligence, capabilities, and values.
On this storytelling level, the film suggests that an important part of the king’s position is performative, for it requires others to recognize his status, and one important problem with the film is Fiennes. Although adept at handling most of the material, his performance is not vivid enough to fill Odysseus with a believable scale of depression, doubt, guilt, anger, love, and resolve. Just as important, Fiennes does not possess an everyman’s face; his distinctive mug is a cinematic asset, so in a story without an Olympian disguise, it seems improbable that his sharp-eyed Spartan wife would fail to recognize him after 20 years—considering that the real Martin Guerre was away for 12 years, yet his wife reportedly recognized him upon his return.
Otherwise, Binoche immerses herself in Penelope, and the queen-as-weaver resists and endures; her techne on the loom becomes a strategic means of preserving power in a world that seeks to rip it from her. Her portrayal is part curt resolve and part empathic authority. She competently portrays the complicated mixture of Penelope’s inner anguish, controlled anger, and cautious optimism.
As a derivative work of art, The Return wrestles with its own points of view. It aspires to explore important themes about perception and insight from a trauma-focused narrative, but the film is often undone by its own scrimping of dramatic focus and coherence. Pasolini’s direction, while occasionally evocative, fails to provide the narrative and visual clarity necessary for a story of this narrow scale. Still, the film’s underlying questions about strategy, deception, and perception make it an interesting, if flawed, adaptation.
David Ryan is Academic Director and Faculty Chair of the Master of Arts in Professional Communication at the University of San Francisco. He’s published widely on rhetoric and film studies and is the co-editor of David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation (FDU Press, 2022).