RETVRN: The Movie

The Odyssey of Uberto Pasolini

Now that the hype and anti-hype around Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has died down a bit, I thought it might be a good idea to do a deep dive into another film from a couple of years ago that deals with the same subject matter in a very different way. I mentioned The Return (2024) in my prior essay about Nolan’s movie, but I’d only really seen clips and read about the film secondhand at that point. I suppose like many people I’d simply forgotten the film existed until I something in the Nolan trailers triggered a memory. This is a shame, because The Return really does deserve to be seen, on its own terms and because of what it represents artistically. Pasolini has created a truly reactionary piece of art with this film, and though perhaps flawed, it points the way to what a more intentionally rightist director might create.

If the name of the movie or director don’t quite ring a bell, its probably because hardly anyone saw the picture. It’s not hard to guess why. The Return is a slow-paced, deeply psychological film with very little action until the end. There is no Homeric adventure involved; unlike the Nolan film, The Return- as the name implies- focuses solely on the final part of Odysseus’ homecoming, the story beginning when he arrives back in Ithaca. Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche are phenomenal actors but not especially huge draws in their own right, and the independent studio that released the film could do little in the way of marketing. Against a $20 million budget, the film earned $3 million at the box office, which means we probably won’t be getting The Return II: The Returnening! starring Jared Leto as Morbaeneas, but such is art.

It would have made $1,000 million morbillion!

Uberto Pasolini, 69, has flown under the radar in much the same way as his movies, which is a shame because he brings to them a very distinct sensibility born of his unique background. Unlike many directors who bear the creative touches of middle-class strivers, Pasolini is an aristocrat- on his father’s side he belongs to both the Pasolini dall’Onda family of Ravenna and the Roman Borgheses, and from his mother he descends from the Viscontis of Milan. He studied classics in boarding school and, in that Italian way, became a banker after attending the London School of Economics, but also in that Italian way, his true passion was for art. He thus thrust himself into the production of 1984’s The Killing Fields by flying to Bankok on his own initiative and accepting work as essentially an errand boy to get his foot in the door, following which he moved up to scouting locations in remote areas (he worked on The Mission in 1986 with Robert DeNiro) and then to producing, with his most notable credit being The Full Monty (1997). He only began directing in 2008, with Machan, a comedy based on a true story where a group of Sri Lankans scammed their way into Germany by pretending to be the national handball team.

That was back when you needed a scam to get in.

More typical is the rest of his small oeuvre. Pasolini has only directed three other films in the last 18 years- Still Life (2013) about a lonely London office worker investigating the life of a man who died with no known next of kin, Nowhere Special (2020), where a terminally ill single father has to find a family to adopt his son once he’s gone, and 2024’s The Return. There are a number of through-lines in his serious films, themes of mortality, loneliness, and inner pain. The variety of the subject matter comes from Pasolini’s main artistic interest, which is to explore the lives of people quite different from himself, a jet-setting blue-blooded international banker turned auteur. He’s more or less the anti-Guy Ritchie; Pasolini’s films are meditative, spare in terms of dialogue, and communicate primarily through color, light, and minimal but purposeful movement. It’s a shame he hasn’t had a chance to work with Daniel Day-Lewis.

Or Brad Pitt. Did someone say, “Mickey in Troy II: The Snatchening?”

Like all good art, The Return has more to say than it says. On one level, it resists a political interpretation, one which Pasolini has himself explicitly rejected (though I label the film reactionary, I should note that he has declared himself apolitical). However, the subject itself, the homecoming of the Greek hero Odysseus, is itself inseparable from notions of what constitutes a well-ordered society, and the nature of justice, family, and transcendent truth. That latter point is to an extent the film’s weak spot, as we will see.

Any treatment of Classical material necessarily says something about the particular vision of the contemporary author and the society from which he derives, as in order to interpret it for a contemporary audience, the author must do a sort of meta-translation, changing the words from one language to another while at the same time transmuting somewhat alien social norms, reconciling them to the general mind of the viewers in a way to which they can relate. In a sense, there is no Odyssey without the possessive qualifier, “Nolan’s,” “Pasolini’s,” “Wilson’s, etc.” It is thus both possible and apropos to look for signifiers of modern meaning in any novel take on ancient texts. We can’t study Homer without learning about ourselves.

I’ve learned that Emily Wilson is a complex antihero.

The film begins with some brief background for those unfamiliar with the story, introducing Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) and Binoche as Penelope. The former gazes out at the rough sea, which in one of the few fading transition shots in the movie, turns into the loom on which the latter is weaving Laertes’ burial shroud. The juxtaposition is telling; formlessness and chaos wedded to stasis in the sense of being unable to process the normal tasks of domesticity. Nothing is right in the absence of the king. It’s not merely the oikos that is disturbed. A plague of suitors has descended on the kingdom, each vying to take the place of the presumed late king, in the meantime consuming his resources while he’s gone.

Since the film more or less came and went without attracting wider notice, the mixed-race casting of the suitors here seems to have passed without comment, at least within the online rightist sphere, very much unlike the case with Nolan. But I would argue that here it actually works, and indeed, adds much to a deeper understanding of the situation of the film in a contemporary context. The suitors are less rival kings than a kind of collective, extractive class, foreign to the commercial, political, and social economy of Ithaca. They have no organic place in the community, and seek merely legal title to plunder what the legitimate ruler disposes of by right. As such, it actually makes perfect aesthetic sense to depict them as a multiracial, exploitative elite who seek to rule by credential rather than blood and arete. But Pasolini is too clever to simply mark them as evil symbols of globalist, managerial liberalism. Rather, he complicates the narrative by creating a world in which it’s entirely likely there won’t be any king coming home, and thus, the specter of how to govern absent traditional authority is a real one. In probably his most significant creative decision here, Pasolini, like Nolan, wholly eschews the Greek gods as such. There is no Athena encouraging Telemachus, and thus, in the film, it makes sense that he doubts that his father will come home, and he actively encourages his mother to pick a suitor to marry, on the grounds that the forms of traditional kingship will have to suffice if the reality cannot be had.

“King Zack is never coming back. You must choose one of us Screeches to be CEO of Ithaca!”

But Odysseus, of course, has come back. In a probably unintentional echo of Nolan’s Inception, we first encounter the hero lying prone on a sunny beach, half in the water, unaware of where he is. But while Dom Cobb of the Nolan film is lost in Limbo, Odysseus has at last returned to Ithaca, as he discovers when he encounters the swineherd Eumaeus. The latter fills him in on the situation created by the former’s absence, that everything has gone wrong without the king, though he does not yet know who he is.

People criticize this film all the time, but it’s my personal favorite movie, and I find something new and interesting about it every time I watch it.

The king’s return to his country is both elemental and spiritual. He emerges from the water; we soon see him devour the very earth of his homeland. He stands naked in the wind- and yes, like Harvey Keitel, Michael Fassbender, and Neil Breen, Ralph Fiennes is totally willing to hang dong for the sake of art. Later, he will make use of his own hearth’s fire to facilitate his vengeance. The submerging-in-water element shows up three times, a perhaps unconscious but unavoidable echo of the Christian sacrament of baptism, done threefold traditionally. He rises from the Ocean, then is reconnected with his son by helping him escape through a pool in the wilderness, then at the end, he’s bathed by Penelope, who washes off the blood that covers him in a symbolic purification that renders him once more capable of domestic life.

Just be glad I didn’t make it the thumbnail. We all look forward to Double Down II: The Schlongening, starring Hugh Jackman as Neil Breen.

The cinematography is tellingly anti-modern. One could almost consider The Return an animated film, save that instead of cartoon cells or digital renderings, it functions more like a series of lovingly crafted Renaissance paintings. The lighting is mostly natural or organic, sun and torches, and the effect is reminiscent of chiaroscuro- Caravaggio might as well have received a production design credit on this one. The domestic elements in particular bring to mind the Dutch masters, with lovingly-crafted shots of the most ordinary elements of interiors.

It’s pretty refreshing after all the over-saturated color movies typically go with these days.

The Odysseus of The Return is, like Nolan’s protagonist, a haunted man. There is nothing of the clever banter or animal sexuality or violent energy of the Homeric hero- we understand that he has been changed by his experiences, such that he has become profoundly different from what he was when he departed twenty years before. There’s modern notions of guilt, but they are leavened with a Classical sense of tragedy and fate. Though he carries a great emotional burden from his time at war, the path he took was taken, and there is no hint in the film itself that Odysseus conceived that he could have done otherwise. He laments the loss of his men, wondering what his kingdom will think of his returning alone, and he does ask for forgiveness from Penelope, but only for being gone, and for his doubting her willingness to receive him once more- “would you still love the man I had become?” He’s less Homer or Nolan that Tolkien in that sense; Pasolini’s Odysseus is both Aragorn, back on his throne having vanquished all threats and would-be usurpers, and Frodo, scarred by a quest that fell to him to complete.

That it was his duty to go to Troy is bound up with the film’s central characterization of Odysseus and the role he’s expected to fill in his society. He is a king, with specific obligations to the social order. Eumaeus lambastes Odysseus for his absence, noting that he himself would have led a revolt, but it was not his place to do so, being a slave. That would only have upset the natural order further, the protection of which is the purview of the true ruler. The people of Ithaca are angry not that Odysseus went to war, but that he has so far neglected to restore the kingdom to its proper functioning. They demand, not to be managed as a resource as the suitors have done, but to be ruled in the truest sense, to have the full human measure of order. But now, in the space where a king should be, there is a faceless group of mostly fungible parasites, whom the people have no power to dislodge. The political and moral reading is there for those with eyes to see.

In this light, Odysseus’ antagonist counterpart is Antinous, played by Tunisian-Dutch actor Marwan Kenzari. Like Odysseus, he’s willing to kill to accomplish his goals, but unlike the hero, he wants domesticity as an end to itself. While all of the suitors came to Ithaca to enjoy a better life, Antinous genuinely loves Penelope, and appeals to her on the grounds of his anti-heroic nature- he’s a potential husband who will never leave her side, who will give her stability and security and comfort. But what he wants belongs to another, and marrying him would necessarily mean forsaking her duty to her husband and his heir, who would certainly not fare well once his father had been replaced. Interestingly, this character trait of Antinous is not found in Homer, but is a plot point in the Armand Assante miniseries, so perhaps Pasolini saw that one.

Seriously, this is really good. I don’t think any other film has better captured Homer’s vision of Odysseus.

Odysseus’ son is angry at the state of affairs, but the fact that Telemachus himself has been unable to rid his home of the suitors speaks to his own less-than-heroic nature. His instinct is to demand his mother solve the problem by giving in to the suitors, rather than take positive action on his own initiative. On another level, he wants to defer self critique of his own weakness by blaming the previous generation for not handing him the stability they enjoyed; he demands his mother admit Odysseus isn’t coming back with a definitive act before he will concede his own agency. Food for thought.

One thing the film does in a very subtle and clever way is communicate character through physique. The suitors (the younger ones at least) have the gym bodies one usually sees in a modern action movie. They thus offer the image of musculature built by mechanical discipline, intended to advertise a concern for peer perception, their bodies rendered a type of tasteful consumer good. Telemachus looks like he was told to avoid weights for the year by the director, showcasing his softness and unreadiness for manly responsibility. The peasants generally give the impression of men accustomed to outdoor labor, especially Eumaeus.

eSports bod.

But Ralph Fiennes’ Odysseus is distinct from all of them. He resembles nothing so much as a piece of driftwood wrapped in leather, rangy, desiccated, and worn smooth, carrying the scars and sunburn appropriate for a man stripped to his raw essence by adversity those at home could not imagine. His very physicality establishes him as an alien in their midst, serving as a narrative marker for the inner distance he has from those who did not go to Troy. Within the film, he makes no effort to disguise himself (and there are no gods to do so) as a tramp, yet no one recognizes him as the lost king, despite his being the right age and having told them he lately arrived from Troy. He is invisible to their notice as the man he is because he is clearly marked as no longer the man he was. His body is the corporeal manifestation of the psychic wounds of war, whose significance is so often unnoticed by those of us with safer lives. It is only in intimate emotional moments (his encounter with Argo, his nurse seeing his childhood scar) that he reveals himself to those willing to see.

Exogenous testosterone or not, the man is absolutely jacked. Steal this look.

Regarding his general demeanor, some commenters have criticized Pasolini’s Odysseus as being in the same category as Old Luke Skywalker, Old Indiana Jones, etc., which is to say a washed-up (get it) miserable old white man stripped of his once-heroic nature. I think this view is mistaken. For all of his shell-shocked mein, the Odysseus of The Return is never anything but deliberate and single minded. All of his musings about the way he might be perceived can be seen as tests of his would-be allies. Put on the spot, he kills a man; perceiving his son is in danger, he leaps to his defense. He’s been transmuted by his experiences, not deconstructed. That latter point is important. Unlike other IP heroes, this Odysseus is not being shoved out of the way for a diverse replacement. Indeed, in one sense, the whole film can be read as a traditional white male character deploying cunning and courage to prevent being usurped in his own narrative legend.

The opposite of this crap

It’s left ambiguous whether Penelope recognizes her husband after meeting him again the first time. He does not yet, as in Homer, explicitly reveal himself to her, and she hands him over to his aforementioned childhood nurse, Eurycleia, to be cared for, ostensibly as a bum in need of alms. Thus, when the climactic contest with the bow occurs, she is perhaps just as shocked as the suitors at his presence. That she is resistant to knowing is bound up with further ambiguity in her character. She does her duty, but part of her clearly longs to put her lost husband in the past, and she has endured her own trauma of uncertainty and abandonment.

All of this comes to a resolution in the slaughter of the suitors scene. Penelope demands a new husband as good as her last one, and requires that they string and fire Odysseus’ bow through a row of ax heads. Their collective failure to do this nearly incites a riot, but then Odysseus picks up the discarded weapon, and (in a nod to his metis) holds the bow over the hearth fire- in a mundane sense softening the glue on an instrument stiff from two decades of neglect, but also sacralizing it with the force of the home he means to defend. He launches an arrow through the axes, then proceeds to kill the suitors with the help of his son and loyal servants.

The violence on display is no gory massacre. It’s oddly stilted in a way. Odysseus shoots arrows, and they find their mark with little bloodshed and insta-kill each man. Even when he switches to his sword, there are no big, dramatic moves; he just kind of single-strikes each opponent and they go down without much fuss. A cynic might chalk it up to Fiennes being 60 at the time, but I think his commitment to the physicality of the role argues something more intentional being depicted. The suitors are men without thumos, and they die as dispiritedly as they lived. Despite there being not much in the way of splatter flying around, Odysseus and Telemachus manage to get coated in fluids, marking the unclean nature of their cleansing of the home.

Antinous is the last. He doesn’t fight, simply resigning himself to death. It’s interesting that in doing so, he actually faces his end more bravely than his peers. He’s not frightened, but sad. Looking to Penelope, he asks her- indicating the carnage- whether this is the love she wanted. It clearly isn’t, and she asks that the defenseless man be spared. Telemachus, as last taking control of the situation, beheads him instead.

Penelope retreats from the scene, horrified. She is summoned to return by her son, now sitting in a now tidy space that shortly before held dozens of corpses. Their passing is already a non-event- unlike in Homer- and Telemachus announces that he intends to depart immediately on his own adventure, a quest to forge his own masculine path. Now doubly horrified at the mass murder and the loss of her only child for the indefinite future, she at last faces her husband, still bloodstained despite everything else being cleaned up.

Having at last experienced death together, they can once again begin to understand one another. So much is subtle here. She laments the bloodshed, and the loss of Telemachus; he acknowledges the pain of both, but in reassuring her that Telemachus will find himself in struggle, so too does he let her know that he has found himself, and has returned to her at last. He asks her forgiveness for being gone, which if given will also allow her to forgive herself for doubting him, and for being tempted with the life she might have had with a suitor. They’ve both seen the possibility of life without the other, and now, to one another, they can as one reject those paths and come together again. He takes her to the bedroom they once shared, which Penelope has carefully concealed, and she bathes him, removing the blood with her own hands, cleansing him of the stain of the violence he took upon himself on her behalf, wrenching her out of her lonely torpor into her rightful place. Telemachus sails off into the distance.

I’m not trying to rag on Charlie Plummer, but he looks like he’d get beaten up by Christopher Plummer, who is 95, dead, and Canadian.

If the film has a flaw, it’s that the director has so totally rejected the gods from the narrative. It’s not only that they don’t appear; the characters never even mention them, and there is no indication they even exist in this world. For a story that deals with the restoration of a transcendent social and political against chaos and usurpation, it’s an odd omission. Pasolini himself has stated that he wanted the characters to exhibit a kind of radical, existential responsibility for their actions- no gods to blame for death and suffering. In this, he’s not only the anti-Guy Ritchie, but also the anti-Julian Jaynes.

I don’t wholly buy the thesis, but I wish I could write something half this thoughtful.

That works on one level, but begs the question of what responsibility even means in a world where actions have no higher significance. The world of Odysseus is one in which the home and the rites of hospitality are sacred. They have no meaning outside a divine order. Being the hero of Troy and a sacker of cities, it’s unclear why he wouldn’t just start over somewhere else rather than risk everything to come home if home is just a building with your stuff in it. And if the gods weren’t keeping him away for 20 years, what was he doing? Why come home now? From whence comes his sense of duty to others? The Return is reactionary in tone, themes, and aesthetics, but not in the sense of being systematically philosophically consistent, owing to the director’s desire to remain apolitical, which means that it faces a kind of disconnect in being a modern, existentialist retelling of a story that owes its origin to a foundationally traditionalist narrative. But even here, there are signs of deeper narrative wholeness.

It’s possible to look at this problem from two perspectives. One, to return to Tolkien once more, a critic might interpret Pasolini’s world as being so suffused with a particular kind of spirituality that explicit mention is redundant. There is no religion in The Lord of The Rings, but it’s no less profoundly religious for all that. Then too is the idea that what is on offer here is a kind of free-floating reactionary template, where the characters are less individuals and more archetypes of roles and forces, something Aeschylus would recognize. In that sense, Pasolini’s work would be profoundly, capital-T Traditional, a depiction of RETVRN in the most authentic way. There are certainly other ways of looking at the film, but fortunately, it’s art that rewards careful thought.

I hope that Pasolini continues in the vein of mythic adaptation, though with the lack of financial success of The Return, it’s unlikely to happen soon. Do him a solid and turn it into a cult classic. For the rest of us, The Return offers insight into what a reactionary aesthetic universe can look like, fully realized by a careful and capable hand. You want right-wing art; here it is. And though this film didn’t make a fortune, the fact that it only cost $20 million shows that an auteur willing to do more with less could effect some ratio of cost to profit where serious subject matter could be handled more regularly. What are you waiting for?