DRAMA; 1hr 56min
STARRING: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Charlie Plummer
He’s so Fiennes
Twenty years after the fall of Troy, stalwart Queen Penelope (Binoche) and her unsettled son Telemachus (Plummer) are waiting and waiting on the island of Ithaca for their paterfamilias, King Odysseus (a ripped and hirsute Fiennes, light years from Conclave ’s chiselled padre), to finally make it back. When that day does dawn, it’s a crashing anticlimax: washed up naked on a beach like a creature of the deep, the once-fearsome king is ravaged by physical exhaustion and an apparently advanced case of post-traumatic stress disorder, in an era (1178 BC) when that psychological concept inconveniently fails to exist.
Since everyone assumes he is long dead, the men caring for their erstwhile leader have no idea who they’re dealing with, which Odysseus, weakened in body yet still the smartest dude in any room, uses to his wily advantage as he takes stock of the woeful state of the island he left behind. Each of Penelope’s horde of greedy suitors is more dislikable than the last, while everyone else is sunk in mourning for the men they lost in battle.
Woe is them, with director Uberto Pasolini (Nowhere Special ) setting a creeping pace through the enshrouding glums. Wizard of misery that he is, Fiennes goes to town on melancholia, gazing darkly into the space between the two worlds that Odysseus is now cursed to inhabit. “How can men find a war but not find their way home?” Penelope justifiably wants to know when she and her errant spouse finally meet up — although not even she has a clue who she’s dealing with. “For some, war becomes home,” Odysseus sagely replies.
Which nobody can deny, tra la, but which makes it no less frustrating that the man refuses to bite the metaphorical bullet and tell her who the hell he is ! Biding his unforgiving time, the king lurks on the sidelines instead, psyching himself to seize a moment only the ancient Greeks could come up with. A noble warrior must claim what he is owed, no matter how deadly the reckoning.
