The Return Uberto Pasolini (It, Fr, Gce, Uk; 2024)
The Return Uberto Pasolini (It, Fr, Gce, Uk; 2024) Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 22 April 2025; Ticket: £13.25
all face no space
Uberto Pasolini’s movie ‘The Return’ is dominated by ‘faciality’. The film comprises: face face face face then more face, all framed of course in big close up. The face that is the principle object of Pasolini’s camera is that of Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus, the king of Ithica who is returning at last from the Trojan War. Fiennes’ face heavily sculpted by the make-up department resonates with the affect of ‘redemptive suffering’, or something like that, which cues the dominant thema of Pasolini’s script: the idea of the returning war vet – of which more later.
The issue with the Fiennes’ face is its invariance. Its used by Pasolini as a sort of touchstone of his movie, his visual leitmotif which is returned to again and again. But the effect is that this close-up that is supposed to say something like ‘redemptive suffering’, at each repetition says less and less until finally completely devalued it says nothing. It has become a parody of itself.
Fiennes’ big face shot is characteristic of ‘The Return’ which is dominated by use of the close-up. In similar respect to the ‘Odysseus’ affect, Juliette Binoche’s ‘Penelope’ gets the same sort of treatment: repeated default big close shot of her face expressing something like the eternal stoicism of women. Telemachus (Odysseus’ son) and Penelope’s suitors are filmed for the most part up close, with the editing cutting from face to face to maintain the flow of dialogue.
‘The Return’ is a film which has at its core the confrontation between the Odysseus’ and his family and the antagonists, the suitors. In respect of understanding oppositional relations, they need to be located in space, space we can see. It is space that is implicitly involved in the creation of dramatic tension. Tension is expressed in body language, in proximities and distances, in the containing environment that is the carapace of action and re-action. Tension needs space. In abandoning space or reducing it to subsidiary element, Pasolini effects the deintensification of the dramatic play-out of his movie. Tension is not created by intercutting from one face to another whether it be angry aggressive mocking sneering; without spacio-temporal referent faces become vacuous signifiers of manipulation not action.
Of course in order for dynamics of any given space to be understood in a movie, it has to be viewed on a big screen, ideally one that fills the viewers field of vision. But a lot of films made today have the look of products made to be viewed on a phone or a home TV monitor. Space and the concomitant action contained therein simply don’t register small scale. On small screen, critical elements of the interactive detail of action simply become background; the eye scans the image which takes about five seconds (perhaps even less on a small device) quickly exhausting all the information that it can gather from the shot. The eye then wants a change of shot. The human face as image on a small screen has an immediate impact. Although the image is absorbed just as quickly, because reading faces is one of the things we do regularly, each face is read as a message with a particular emotional or perhaps occasionally cognitive meaning. Small scale projection: faces are easy for to read; wide shots may simply fail to register.
The reality is that ‘The Return’ like many contemporary movies has not been made for its comparatively brief short first theatrical release. It’s produced for the long run: to be available on-line on demand, filling out TV schedules and as a sort of time filler material on smart phones.
That’s entertainment.
‘The Return’ is a retelling of Odysseus’ return to Ithica. In answer to the many ways in which the story might have been adapted Pasolini’s script opts to reduce the story to a one dimensional idea of the traumatised vet. Odysseus in ‘The Return’ represents the returning soldier, broken burnt out by war, like a US vet coming back from Vietnam or Iraq. Pasolini renders Homer’s multifaceted myth in one emotional key indelibly stamping it with imprimatur of Fiennes’ face.
As a director Uberto Pasolini (unlike his namesake Pier Paolo who also directed films based on Greek myth) doesn’t look like he knows what he is doing with his movie. This might have to do with the fact that he was beholden to a potpourri of financial backers, each supplying a commissioning editor with their own interests to champion.
There’s no vision no singular perception shaping of ‘The Return’. Pasolini only offers us ‘a face’. Odysseus’s home is depicted as a monumental Wagnerian Castle, but if this is the vision why not give the film a Wagnerian feel? Pasolini’s attention to costume and prop detail is minimal as if its enough to dress up his male actors in loin cloths and old blankets, and his women in one or another type of wrap-about. There is no imprint of a stylistic sensibility in the scenario, simply a satisfaction with the scripted thema of the returning vet. The actors playing up as the suitors never look anything other than hirelings from the world of soap opera, unable to to move on from the look of ‘the Sword-and-Sandals’ epics churned out by Cinecitta in the 1950’s and 60’s. But in the case of these movies the cod inauthenticity of the productions (such as Hercules, 1958, starring Steve Reeves) was part of their attraction and charm. In ‘The Return’ the disjunction between the acting, the contemporary nature of the dialogue simply creates a disassociation between the theme and the means Pasolini uses to realise his theme.
The returning vet is an issue that has been well covered by Hollywood and other Cinemas, but if this idea was to dominate ‘The Return’ Pasolini perhaps should have set his film in the present times where it might have made a claim for some sort of authenticity, rather than looking as it does a mismatched hotchpotch of disparate elements.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk