As you will know from reading your Homer, after his victory at the battle of Troy, the warrior king Odysseus got waylaid on his journey home to Ithaca. Instead of taking weeks, Odysseus’s voyage lasted years. There was many a mythical adventure en route. Hence, yes, the word “odyssey”. The Return picks up the story as the last section of The Odyssey did, with Odysseus finally washed up half-dead on his troubled native island. Grizzled, battle-scarred and bewildered, he is taken in by a swineherd, where he licks his wounds and mentally regroups before eventually heading off towards his palace disguised as a beggar. Surely he will re-assert himself as king? Surely things will then go back to the way they were? As in Homer, so in director Uberto Pasolini’s version of the story, it’s not going to be as straightforward as all that.
While he’s been gone, Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, has been besieged by suitors wanting to marry her. She has kept them at bay by saying that she’ll make a choice when she’s finished weaving the shroud she’s working on. But though she sits at the loom by day, by night she unpicks her work, determined to buy time. Alone among everyone around her, she believes her husband is still alive. Her son Telemachus, meanwhile, has grown to bearded manhood without the hand of a father to guide him and is peevish, abusive and sullen. Penelope’s suitors scorn Telemachus openly and wonder out loud if he wants to have sex with her (different myth, boys). Given half a chance they will probably try and kill him.
The Return in some respects thematically rounds off Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, from 20 years before. Though that was a story focused on the stand-off between Hector (Eric Bana) and Achilles (Brad Pitt), with Odysseus (Sean Bean) almost a walk-on, it was more thoughtful than is usual in films full of men in leather skirts, and the dominant idea was the same – that war is sometimes necessary but the price it exacts is awful.
Here it’s Ralph Fiennes, almost Hugh Jackman-ripped, as the old king warily looking on as various chancers, thugs and deviants circle his wife, while Juliet Binoche plays Penelope as a proud woman, her performance suggesting that Penelope knows in her guts who the old beggar is on their first meeting, though her mind is slow to catch up. Charlie Plummer, meanwhile, plays Telemachus as a deeply unpleasant and weak individual in every respect the obverse of the noble king.
Pasolini takes it at the prescribed stately pace when getting a bit of a move on here and there might have helped things a bit, but the performances are universally good, with Fiennes and Binoche both choosing different mental conditions – he’s on the PTSD spectrum, whereas she’s more schizophrenic – to shade characters who are in other respects lifted from every biblical, Roman, Greek or Egyptian epic you’ve ever seen.
The score, by Rachel Portman (once Pasolini’s wife), is also a stately vamp, and the visuals, by Radu Jude’s go-to cinematographer Marius Panduru (check out Aferim! if you want to see him at his best) are rich but restrained, as if to say yes, this is your lush, fine-looking epic, but there’s no celebrating going on. There’s a hint of austerity in Panduru’s lighting.
Like Troy it saves its main bout of action for the finale, the moment when Odysseus finally asserts himself as the king, picks up his bow and delivers the justice that his benighted island has been in need of since he’s been gone.
A reveal, a reconciliation, a reunification, a vindication and a routing of enemies all in one go, it is a massively satisfying big finish, after an inordinate number of scenes in which the disguised king has looked on warily from the side, inscrutably surveilling but not bestirring himself.
Uberto Pasolini’s most famous contribution to cinema thus far has been as a producer, of The Full Monty most notably. Directorially he has never set the world alight, though Machan, Still Life and Nowhere Special are all fine, fuzzily warm human interest dramas. The Return shifts him decisively into new territory, the epic, which is where Uncle Luchino was often to be found with films like The Leopard and Ludwig. It suits him.
The Return – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2025
