The Return review – Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche reunite in drab drama

There are no sirens, cyclops or six-headed monsters in Uberto Pasolini’s adaptation of The Odyssey. His film, The Return, skips most of the great big adventure at sea from Homer’s epic poem, which was previously translated to the big screen in 1955’s Ulysses starring Kirk Douglas (and the Coen brothers’ Oh, Brother Where Art Thou?).

Instead, Pasolini’s handsome, sombre and meditative take homes in on Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche’s faces. The camera loves them. It barely leaves them, watching for the light from the setting sun or crackling fire as it searches across their weary brows or sullen cheeks, or when a painterly circle of smoke orbits their heads like thrones.

I could stare at them for hours. Binoche especially. Her performance is short with words. But she holds and command long stretches of silence, as if bending it to her whims, doing the most in a movie that too often feels like an endurance test.

Fiennes and Binoche, The English Patient pair reunited, are playing long-separated lovers Odysseus and Penelope, as they patiently wait in caves and caverns, committing to emotional work, before their own reunion. In Pasolini’s hands, The Odyssey becomes a Coming Home narrative about grappling with PTSD. Perhaps it always was.

Fiennes’s Odysseus (the character is also named Ulysses, depending on the text), is ravaged by battle scars – physically, emotionally and mentally – and spends much of the film resigned to a corner, so changed that he can’t bear facing his wife. Meanwhile, Penelope, waiting decades for her husband to return home to their island Ithaca, will have to grapple with how much of him is left, should he even make it back.

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The Return is a heroic gambit for Pasolini, who is out here trying to remind us that these classic Greek characters, and their texts, are timeless; and not just when you can slap a Marvel logo on their backs. But his narrative restraint is admirable to a fault. Stripping the narrative of its gods and monsters, and almost two-thirds of the chapters, is great but the vacuum isn’t filled with much more than his two magnetic leads and consistently sumptuous cinematography. The Return is gorgeous to behold, but there just isn’t enough there.

The film begins with Fiennes’ Odysseus beached on Ithaca, the rustic island he once ruled as king. He’s returned from the violent seas: naked, broken and carrying the guilt that none of his army survived the journey back from the Trojan war. He plays Odysseus’s torment over the men he lost with a head constantly bowed, his barely audible words scraped out grave and whispery. It’s as though he refuses to take command of his own voice because of how things turned out in the past. Odysseus spends much of the film retreating to the shadows and witnessing the devastation of his home and family, like its due comeuppance. Meanwhile, his wife, Queen Penelope, alongside her young distraught son (Charlie Plummer), are largely left to defend their throne from an occupation.

The mob, with its insatiable appetite for the local livestock and women, and the political schemers among them, pressure Penelope to pick a new husband. She rebuffs their aggressive propositions, biding time by saying she will choose a husband once she finishes knitting a shroud for her ailing father-in-law – though she secretly spends her nights undoing her work on the shroud, buying Odysseus more time to find his way home.

As with the original text, there are vague hints that Penelope is also spending her nights satisfying the urges of her suitors to keep them at bay. Here Pasolini leaves a lot to be desired. A modern retelling of this story, which grapples with archaic ideas about virtues, could have teased out the thorny symbolism attached to Penelope, and the complicated way she’s admired for saving herself for her husband, especially since there isn’t much else going on. But The Return is too coy for that. It mostly leaves its lead actors weary and silent demeanors to suggest what the film refuses to say.

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They do that spectacularly, though their performances often only work in isolation because so many of the supporting cast members are leaden by comparison. Pasolini also turns out to be a better director of smoke and light than action, which becomes painfully obvious when The Return eventually arrives at the point where Odysseus stands up to the vile cackling suitors demanding a cathartic send-off.

The violence is sufficiently brutal but bled dry of tension. And it gives way to a monologue from Binoche’s Penelope about men’s violent nature, which is captivatingly performed but surprisingly didactic and on the nose. It actually leaves you craving the silence the film managed to get by with earlier.

• The Return is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released at a later date