Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.A title like The Return may seem frustratingly vague, but the operative word in this instance is “the”; Uberto Pasolini’s drama recounts the return, the definitive one as far as classical mythology is concerned. The subject is the homecoming of Odysseus after the perils recounted in Homer’s Odyssey — soon to be a major motion picture, and a considerably more expensive one, directed by Christopher Nolan.By comparison, Pasolini’s film is a stripped-down version of the story, covering only the end of Odysseus’s wanderings. With script credits shared by Pasolini, John Collee and the late, revered British playwright Edward Bond, this is a work of some seriousness, austere and a touch theatrical, that opens up the story’s complexities and contemporary resonances in inquiring detail.Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes), first seen washed up naked on the shore of Ithaca, is burned out, scarred physically and mentally, and prone to ruefully demystifying the fabled Trojan war and his own role in it. Meanwhile, in a palace high on a crag, his wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche) is besieged by suitors who are more like a hostile invasion force. When the queen finally sees her husband again, a quizzical, distant Binoche gently suggests troubled hesitancy, as if this glowering, ragged revenant may not be worth the trauma of reunion.The Return retains the essentials of the original: the archery challenge; the faithful dog Argos; the nurse who recognises Odysseus by his scars (Ángela Molina, agelessly imposing as ever, as if one of the Fates has inveigled her way on to the palace payroll). Among the thuggish suitors, the exception is Antinous, silkily played by Marwan Kenzari — a diplomat and plotter, all the more ruthless for wanting to win not just Penelope, but her love.The two leads, former co-stars in Wuthering Heights and The English Patient, generate an authentic crackle of mutual wariness. Fiennes gives a heavyweight performance; his Odysseus seems to physically carry the burden of a life’s pains, aware that his survival, when so many have died, is both honour and disgrace. In that sense, this story is about war as a constant of the human condition, which Troy has fatally bequeathed the world: war, Odysseus says, “is everywhere — everything we see and touch”. Pasolini was producer of The Full Monty, his own films as director including Eddie Marsan vehicle Still Life, a wry cogitation on mortality. The Return is a grander affair, but arthouse rather than Hollywood in tone. The Corfu locations, with cinematography by Marius Panduru, are impeccably chosen for evoking the very harshest beauty, sun-parched thorns, dry rocks and gravel.The palace, by contrast, is a stately, formal arena for a closing round of bloodletting. The Return is not only Hellenic but Shakespearean in its severe pomp — which gives it a slightly archaic feel as cinema. But this ambitious film is a reminder of how much the ancient world can tell us about the discontents of heroism as an idea. The Return is not quite a classic, but it serves the spirit of the classics imposingly well.★★★★☆In cinemas now
