Column | Mrs. Odysseus recognizes that old man best

Films about the classical Greece are too much. They are usually cozy, with Greek heroes in fantasy-weapons, roaring in a photogenic Mediterranean area: Azuren Sea, beautiful girls, beautiful boys. I am thinking of Brad Pitt’s flop crack-and-chilles, the bullying Helena from Irene Papas. Favorite is Homer ‘Odysseus, the steel-spiered, the god tough, the Snaaksgegebreinde-to say it supposedly homeric.

Also The Return revolves around Odysseus, and I think, I know that, I just skip it.

But yes, Juliette Binoche plays Penelope, Mrs. Odysseus. Binoche is dear to me. She is so good, I put an honor to see every new film with her, whatever it is.

So I’m going to the cinema anyway.

Fortunately, because I see a masterful film. Without miracles, without samples, no cycloop in sight. Without contemporary-tinted glamor. With inactive gods – they are called, but God never gives at home, that is known. Of course there is violence and filthy too, but it is unpectacular.

Is satisfactory The Return On the picket posts. Odysseus’ old dog who sees his boss and then dies (breaking eyes, check). The elderly nurse who recognizes him by a scar (her bewilderment, check). The wedding bed that Odysseus cut from the trunk of an olive tree (check, but only to see if you pay attention).

A wedding drama is calm with old love and ripened anger, taking into account Homer ‘ timeline: Odysseus sailed to Troy, he comes back to Penelope and now we are twenty years later. Both are around sixty, both are survivors. He is ashamed. And she? She doesn’t recognize him. At least, she pretends and Juliette Binoche plays that unparalleled. She keeps Penelope’s face in the fold, at the same time she makes us feel that Penelope knows best who that man is with that old head. And also that she is not going to make it easy for him. Homer could write what he wanted The Return Is about her. I see a movie about an older woman, with a Greek hero in the supporting role.

What he did in that war, she wants to know. Did he terrorize the men who wanted to have a marriage in her?

Odysseus’ Vrijersmoord? Check. (What do you mean? These are sex offenders). The twenty ‘maid’, in the authority of Odysseus in a row tied up, as ‘thrushes with their long wings’? Check? Hey, they are missing.

Odysseus suspects this serving of sexual services to the lovers. As if they had a choice. « They were still struggling with their feet, for a moment, but not long. » Homer’s meaning was written by writer Margaret Atwood and wrote Penelopiada heartbreaking and Homer-Filling novel.

The Return Is incomplete without the girl’s murder (girls? No, women). Homer lets Penelope know about it and remain silent about it. That is essential. By the way, Binoche can probably remain silent. Now I no longer see a masterful film, now he is masterful. Unfortunately.

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