By N.P. Thompson
In Heading South (or Vers le Sud, before the film was re-titled for speakers of American) director Laurent Cantet adapts a few short stories by Dany Laferrière, positing a trio of white Northerners on a beach in Haiti during the summer of 1979. The three women -- played by Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young and Louise Portal -- adopt (paid) black boyfriends who are three or more decades younger than themselves. Cantet intends the viewers, and if not them, then certainly the reviewers, to inhale the geopolitik drift of associations vis-à-vis “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s regime, the ruling power at the time. 
The movie’s idea of political relevance is a joke, however. It’s all subliminal, and while I don’t mind having to work to divine meanings from an artist’s intentions, here, anyway, Cantet isn’t an artist. He’s made the kind of film that’s meant to be inferred, not watched -- in short, a natural for “analysis” by practitioners of what I call the Village Voice school of arts criticism, which turns out reviewers who are so hyperaware politically that you don’t have to be, and neither does the moviemaker. There’s more talk of Duvalier in the press kit than in Heading South itself, a movie in which one minor character effusively refers to another minor character as a “guardian angel,” then, in due time, said angel turns out to be a pistol-brandishing assassin, to the surprise of absolutely no one.
Louise Portal's Sue -- in whom Cantet has so little interest that she hardly registers as a character at all, or even as a type -- hails from Montreal and works in a factory there. Rampling's Ellen is an Englishwoman who teaches French literature at Wellesley, where, of course, she despises her students. Brenda is supposed to be an affluent housewife from Savannah, Georgia, though as the mousy Karen Young plays her, with a flat, nasal New York accent, this seems highly unlikely. Brenda is a masochistically conceived role. She has the hots for one of the young men, Legba (played with a great deal of assurance by Ménothy Cesar), whom she seduced on the beach three summers before; but Legba now sleeps with Ellen, and so the two women vie to possess him. After Legba finally beds Brenda again, here is Young, on the long duration without him: “My belly ached. Every night. Especially at night.” Wouldn’t body language and facial expression convey this desperation just as plainly, sans the impossible dialogue?
There’s a glaze of sexual and racial politics, over which cine-pundits will make much. But this, too, is more spoon-feeding than food for thought. The women insist that the Haitian teenagers are different because of the setting and circumstance; yet it’s the women’s perceptions that are different. Over dinner, the question comes up as to why they don’t date black men at home. The reason strikes me as fairly obvious: Why does anyone depart from expectation when out of town? In Haiti, the women are free from the scrutiny of white culture looking askance at their interracial relations. 
Far from being politically or sexually insightful, Heading South belongs to a sub-genre that has sprung up in recent years: Terrible, Euro-trashy, erotically-tinged movies Charlotte Rampling stars in, and typically outclasses.
As in Rampling's endeavors for the ridiculous François Ozon, Under the Sand and Swimming Pool, Rampling gives a warm, winning performance as a character who isn’t all that likable -- a sensitive, intelligent soul who, as you would expect in cinema of this bent, finds herself in the most outré of situations. Near the end of Heading South, when Rampling’s haughty Ellen lambastes the dishrag Brenda, it’s a moment worthy of Bette Davis at her peak. Like Davis, Rampling inhabits the supreme echelons of vindictiveness as naturally as she breathes -- or perhaps I should say, as naturally as she exhales her cigarette. She's ideally suited to play women who best assuage their own hurt by hurting others. It’s been a while since she last had a director and a script that were her equal, but at least she continues to work, year after year, not denying us the good, bitchy pleasures of her company.
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Heading South opens July 7 in New York. For more reviews by N.P. Thompson, visit his website, Movies into Film.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Sun and sand and stud service: Laurent Cantet's "Heading South"
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10 comments:
I haven't seen this film and can't comment on the politics in it. However, I thought Cantet's Human Resources and Time Out both captured political subtext with near-perfect subtlety.
In the former, even though Cantet's sympathies clearly lay with the burgeoning class consciousness of the young protagonist, he was perceptive enough to present the ambiguous differences between working class and middle class awareness of the class struggle with a keen eye. For instance, when we first meet the Communist labor representative, she appears to us, immersed as we are in the middle class/management perspective of the protagonist, as an unreasonable relic of another time. By the end of the film, without her changing at all, we are entirely on her side. Similarly, the protagonist's father, a man we expect to be at the forefront of the labor movement, is uninterested in the union and proud of his son's upward mobility to the point of disappointment at his son's activism, even at the cost of his own job.
In Time Out, the critique of middle class expectations takes and even more creepy and pointed tone, despite the fact that it's hardly mentioned at all. Most, if not all, of the conflict derives from the viewer's amazement at and fear of the depths to which the protagonist will go to give the appearance of thriving as a successful business/policy executive, all while fervently avoiding being swept back into the rat race. We the viewers expect his deceptions will lead to a terrible climax of some sort, but the climax is of a very different sort than we think it will be, mainly because it drives the pervading sense of dread by playing on our beliefs about the parameters of life. Any movie that can call those parameters into question without betraying the truth of the narrative is what I consider a successful use of political subtext.
Perhaps this puts me into the school of thought disparaged in this review, I dunno. Based on these two films, I think Cantet has the best grasp of how to interweave politics and narrative of any current filmmaker, more reminiscent of The Battle of Algiers than, say, Syriana.
Well, speaking of recent Charlotte Rampling movies, I thought Lemming was a very good suspense movie, although, despite the efforts of the filmakers, nothing more than a suspense movie. (The whole bit with the remote-controlled camera didn't really amount to anything, for example.) And she really gets to work in that one with her brakes off - she's nasty and vindictive from the word go.
I'm with you on Cantet's previous work, Hayden, but I'd lower your expectations considerably for Heading South, which was the most disappointing film I saw at Toronto last year. In the other films, Cantet's keen class consciousness is so well-integrated into the story that nothing needs to be articulated. Here, it's like he's speaking through a bullhorn. Charlotte Rampling, however, is at her imperious best.
Scott: Agreed about Rampling, but about that bullhorn: When I first saw this one, I questioned that very detail about Cantet's tone, that the class rift was a bit oversimplified for audiences who had to work for it more in his earlier films.
But now I'm convinced that this is very much done on purpose, that there has to be an irrefutable (read: blatantly inequal) contrast between the women's hedonism-privileged bubble and the REAL streets of '70s Haiti so that we're conscious of, well, just how unconscious they are of this world outside their narrow vision. They have no excuse.
Time Out is still my fave of his, but this 'un is sitting pretty on my list of faves for the year. (Can I say that halfway through?)
Npt has nailed the shortcomings of this trashy beach movie. For those of you who liked it, would you have been as impressed if the women were old men humping teenaged girls in thailand? Political erotica is one of the crassest and most hypocritical of sub genres, whether it be the recent "constant gardener" or "sweet movie."
i agree that Rampling was good, but the other women were dreadful. i never believed for a moment that they came from the places from which they claimed to have come.
"Before the film was re-titled for speakers of American"?
Why is it invariably Romance languages that get this sort of weirdly snooty treatment? Would anyone say with a straight face: "In Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day (or Guling jie shaonian sha ren shijian, before the film was re-titled for speakers of American)..."
Rampling will never top either ZARDOZ or ANGEL HEART, although which one is superior is debatable - my money's on AH.
And say what you will about SWIMMING POOL - it was great fun and the Ludivine eye candy was even better.
Wait, so your problem is that a movie about white women going to a third-world country to have sex with underage black men isn't political enough? I can't think of a more charged set up (it's hardly "subliminal," in any case). If anything, the problem with HEADING SOUTH (which, even though it's a literal translation of the title, does sound like sequel to LOSIN' IT) is that it's *too* political -- or at least, that there's nothing to it except politics. As you point out, the characters (especially the non-white ones) are sketchily developed at best. Rampling's persona fills in a few of the gaps, but she's essentially phoning it in, albeit at a pretty high level. ("Ridiculous" or not, Ozon has gotten the best performances from Rampling in many years, especially in UNDER THE SAND.) I think you're a bit unfair to Karen Young, however, whose performance is the one thing that keeps HEADING SOUTH from being a complete wash. She's hardly "mousy," merely dressing down as women of means can afford to do, and her potent sexual jealousy is really the movie's only fully developed emotion. As for her accent or lack thereof, the movie doesn't say she's from Georgia, only that she lives there, and I know plenty of people from Southern states (my girlfriend, a Dallas native, among them) who speak as if they grew up in Scarsdale.
I'm puzzled with the author's take that Under the Sand and Swimming Pool were Euro-trashy..Under the Sand dealt with grief and Swimming Pool was about a woman letting go of her inhibitions thru her imagination. Why because Ludivine danced to a cheesy Eurodisco song? Charlotte Rampling's sting is unique. I love it.
Just seen the movie today. I agree with Sam Adams that the movie hardly needs more politics: the setup is so political as-is that any more highlighting would be superfluous. The problem with it was everything else: Cantet's resort to anvils (Albert's monologue, the scene with Megba and her ex-girlfriend (yes, you're both whores, WE GET IT)), the stilted perfomances (there were several scenes where the dialogue didn't "flow" at all; you could tell that the actors were waiting for each other to finish their lines before speaking), the contrivances in Brenda's final reaction... A total disappointment.
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