Dir. Laurent Cantet, 2005, France / Canada, 108 min
Cast: Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, Louise Portal, Ménothy Cesar
Review by Peter Fraser
‘Tourists never die’ says one character in Heading South, Laurent Cantet’s follow-up to previous films Human Resources and Time Out, and the same could go for the spectators watching the film, who are allowed, through the magic of celluloid, to trespass in foreign climes with little danger to themselves other than a sore behind from an unyielding cinema seat or, if they’re particularly sensitive, a wounded conscience. Yet Cantet is not at all interested to guilt-trip the audience; his film is more provocative than that, more dangerous and less easily dismissed. The eyes are, after all, vulnerable; if spectating is an act of non-intervention, then, in a sense, it leaves the spectator powerless. Sometimes what we witness remains with us and within us.
So at the end of Heading South when Brenda, played by Karen Young of Sopranos fame, bears witness to her time in Haiti in the late seventies as a reminiscence, testimony and confession, it seems clear that if ‘tourists never die’, then they have a strange immortality. Rather, their immortality is pre-lapsarian - before self-knowledge intrudes. Brenda, it seems, looks back on her time in Haiti as a paradise lost, but equally as a paradise it was somehow necessary to lose. From this, you may gather that Heading South is political with a small ‘p’: it deals with gender, sex, race and class inequalities, but it does not proselytise and it offers no easy solutions. Brenda’s sense of her paradise lost and the peripatetic lifestyle that follows seems a sorrowful shrug, as if to say you can’t ever really escape but neither can you really go home again.
So you remain in transit. Such is the situation of the traveller or the migrant, and not only is it profoundly different to that of the tourist, but that difference seems to say something about two of the prevalent subjectivities in a globalised age, the first ripples of which had long washed into shore from the future, at the time when Heading South is set. An audience in the northwestern hemisphere can hardly miss the parallel between themselves and Ellen, Brenda and Sue – from France, the USA and Canada – who come to Haiti in the late 1970s to indulge their long-frustrated sexual desires with the local boys but remain largely, and in some cases wilfully, oblivious to the socio-political situation outside of their idyllic sex resort. The women can hardly avoid the economic question because their presence and their purchasing power imply their economic ascendancy. So, they’re also harbingers of a new era of consumerism.
Yet the principal strength of Heading South, because it’s the strength from which many of the others derive, is that Cantet shows that this is not simply ‘neo-colonialism’, this time with dollars rather than arms, with the white women cast as economic exploiters and the black boys simply as victims. It’s much more complex, as exemplified by nuanced performances from Charlotte Rampling as Ellen, the cynical matriarch apparently permanently ensconced at the resort, and newcomer Menothy Cesar, who plays Legba, the object of the ladies’ affections, with mercurial grace. ‘There’s nothing in Boston for a woman over forty,’ says Brenda, inviting us to draw a comparison between women who are oppressed in their own societies and the Haitian boys dealing with the economic and racial oppression that is their own colonial legacy.
The very title Heading South implies a journey into the southern hemisphere but also a journey into old age, conjoining the predicaments of the Haitian boys and the Northwestern women. It also, and I’m afraid rather pertinently, suggests death: its increasing proximity in years for the aging women and its physical proximity for the boys in the crime-ridden slums of their native country. As a Frenchman, Cantet is placed in a doubly challenging position, depicting another gender and another culture (and, indeed, an island colonised by France - his own presence there, and their French language, dictated by a vexed history). He, too, is a spectator and he bears witness admirably, but perhaps his most notable asset is his restraint. In creating such an even-handed film, he does not make idle presumptions, nor adopt a superior view.
In Heading South, both the women and the boys, ‘men before their time’, find some escape in the sex resort, and they both have their currency. The women have their money, their maturity, their acceptance, while the boys have their virility, their youth and, also, their acceptance. Their greatest gift to each other is their non-judgement - also Cantet’s modus operandi - which is perhaps only possible through their ultimate non-involvement in each other’s lives. The relations between the women and Legba come to seem something more than simply the shifting power relations that manifest themselves in their mutual desires for escape - the women from stifling societies that cast them away when old, Legba from a society that endangers any old age he might imagine. So are you a cinematic tourist or a traveller? Heading South is the kind of film that makes you the latter, demanding your involvement, and living with and within you. In that sense, it’s political and it’s highly recommended.
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