'The Return' Is a Trip Better Not Taken

Uberto Pasolini’s The Return isn’t just built off the closing stages of Homer’s Odyssey – featuring a guilt-ridden, lonely Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) tentatively and reluctantly returning to the frayed, fragile kingdom overseen by his queen Penelope (Juliette Binoche) – it builds on an appealing interpretation of its final scenes. The Trojan War has been fought and won, but Odysseus’ journey home has been just as testing, and when he washes up naked on the shore of his island, Ithaca, surrounded by fragments of his boat, his kingdom is in disarray.

Suitors leer at his wife, who delays choosing one of them to replace Odysseus by weaving and unpicking a burial shroud for Odysseus’ ailing father, and his adolescent son Telemachus has built years of resentment against him – Odysseus returns a timid, shaky man, palpably aware of who he has let down back home. But while The Return taps into a rich vein of Classically Inspired drama, Pasolini’s imagination and craftsmanship deflate the potent promise of his premise, leaving a shredded Fiennes and a reserved Binoche stranded in a distinctly amateurish film that refuses to meaningfully extrapolate beyond the basics.

The Odyssey argues that, after the epic saga of the Trojan War, returning home is as significant as the victory that lets you begin your homecoming journey. The epic poem is filled with obstructive encounters, disguised identities, tests of loyalty, and reflections on the wanderer’s – and broader society’s – relationship to hospitality. Like many Classical texts, the Odyssey has influenced modern storytelling in countless ways – entrenched in the closing stages of the Hero’s Journey is a concept of rebirth, that the person who set out on a quest will not be the same person who returns on its completion.