Italian director Uberto Pasolini has wanted to bring Homer’s The Odyssey to the screen for decades. He finally achieved his dream, and the result is The Return, which stars Ralph Fiennes as the titular king trying to find his way home and Juliette Binoche, who plays his wife, Penelope.
We got a trailer today giving us a hint of both of those actors’ performances, which are unsurprisingly fantastic.
“Working with Juliette and Ralph, most of the time you say action and you just watch and watch and watch because it is extraordinary,” Pasolini said at a press conference (per Variety) for the film. “They give you something more complex than you could ever have dreamed of. When you’re making a film, you live for these moments. It reminds you of what Bergman said, that the most beautiful thing to look at is the face. When these two faces communicate like they do in this film, it’s a blessing.”
The trailer also “spoils” most of the story (if you can spoil a story pretty much everyone knows). As does the official synopsis, which you can read below:
After 20 years away, Odysseus (Fiennes) washes up on the shores of Ithaca, haggard and unrecognizable. The King has returned from the Trojan War, but much has changed in his kingdom. His beloved wife Penelope (Binoche) is a prisoner in her own home, hounded by suitors vying to be king. Their son Telemachus faces death at the hands of these suitors, who see him as merely an obstacle to their pursuit of the kingdom. Odysseus has also changed—scarred by his experience of the Trojan war, he is no longer the mighty warrior from years past—but he must rediscover his strength in order to win back all he has lost.
In addition to Fiennes and Binoche, The Return stars Charlie Plummer, Marwan Kenzari, Claudio Santamaria, and Ángela Molina. The script adaptation comes from John Collee, Edward Bond, and Pasolini.
Pasolini wanted to focus on a certain aspect of the story that hasn’t got much screen time before. “The Return was born from my passion for Homer’s epic, and from the extraordinary fact that despite the ubiquity of the Odyssey in Western culture, and its timeless and universal themes, cinema has never done justice to the story of this soldier’s return to his land, his wife, his son,” Pasolini said in a press statement. “And today, Homer’s work forces us to confront the tragedy of war, of those who fight it and of those left behind, in a way that feels incredibly and sadly relevant.”
You can see Pasolini’s vision when the film premieres in theaters on December 6, 2024.
Check out the trailer below.
