The Return
Homer’s Odyssey has been adapted countless times on the big screen. From Theo Angelopoulos’s haunting Ulysses’s Gaze to the Coen Brothers’s comedy caper O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the canonical text is ripe for reinterpretation. However, it has, for the most part, not been reinterpreted with The Return; Uberto Pasolini’s adaptation is a largely faithful one.
Almost 30 years after they tugged on our heartstrings in The English Patient, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche have reunited to once again smoulder on screen, albeit in the decidedly different setting of ancient Greece. Fiennes’s ageing Odysseus, King of Ithaca, is washed ashore after two decades of war. In his absence, his tormented wife, Penelope (Binoche), has been hounded by would-be suitors. Her son, Telemachus (Charlie Plummer), has never met his father and is constantly on edge as he, too, is pursued by his father’s enemies.
This is, ultimately, an opportunity for Fiennes and Binoche to show off their acting chops. Fiennes’s portrayal of the Greek hero is weary and melancholic, as he carries the burden of all the comrades he lost in the war. Dead animal imagery poignantly reflects his plight, with Odysseus’s thousand-yard stare symptomatic of what we would now term PTSD. Similarly, as a woman carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, Binoche plays her role with trademark poise. Unlike previous adaptations that may have relegated Penelope to a damsel in distress, here, she is a resilient figure in the face of patriarchy and male entitlement to both her body and her lofty status.
The commanding presence of its stars aside, the film is a somewhat unambitious adaption of such a seminal text. Though lush and undeniably beautiful, the Greek setting, for instance, is not fully utilised within the narrative. Likewise, despite such a prominent role, Telemachus doesn’t feel fully fleshed out. The same can be said for the subsidiary characters, the majority of whom are somewhat underdeveloped.
However, excellent performances elevate this uneven adaptation. Fiennes and Binoche have enough intensity between them to carry The Return, with the acting veterans showing no signs of relinquishing the magnetism that captivated cinemagoers all those decades ago.
Antonia Georgiou
The Return is released nationwide on 11th April 2025.
Watch the trailer for The Return here:
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