Excellent movie. From the sprawling epic The Odyssey, Uberto Passolini chooses to focus on the final challenge of King Odysseus, when he returns home to find both his home and himself changed. Instead of the spectacle of battle, we get a tense, introspective meditation on the inability to ever really go home again.
Which is not to say that it lacks for drama. King Odysseus arrives on the island of Ithaca as an anonymous shipwreck survivor. The Queen holds out hope that her husband is still alive, and stalls the suitors who vie for her hand. They are a swarm of locusts, arriving with their entourages, nothing but bands of thugs. They want the crown, the island, the wealth of Ithaca, but they pillage the land of food, attack and rape the people, and threaten the lives of the Queen and her son. The Queen is using every tool of diplomacy and custom to put off acquiescing to their demands, but time is running out. And Odysseus seems to have been spared in battle only to see the death knell of his home. He has no men, no weapons, no money, is sick in spirit and weak in body. Does he even want to claim this ruin of a home and does this home want this ruin of a king?
Ralph Fiennes gives a powerful and resonant performance as a man absolutely haunted. He has not simply been lost, he is lost. He has journeyed into war, and brought it with him when he left. It is inside him all the time, and he is terrified it will spill out of him, here on the land he sought to protect.
Juliette Binoche also gives a great performance as Queen Penelope, who as a woman has very few options open to her, and is working with the limited means that are available to her to preserve what is left of peace in the land she is responsible for. She is also trying to keep control over the very personal decision to stay loyal to the memory of her husband, be he dead or alive, be he faithful or wayward. For her, she swore her love and fidelity to him, and she has no wish to do that with any other man. Juliette does a great job of showing her as a woman under the strain of duty, shrewd in playing politics while confined within the feminine sphere, but deeply wounded from a very personal loss.
While the setting and story are ancient, The Return speaks to the timeless and universal experience of the veteran’s return, of the incommunicability of the experience of war to those who have not seen it, of the distance which grows within families as a natural consequence of separation, of how unrecognisable you may become to others and even yourself.