ShareThisBy PHIL VILLARREAL
Friday, October 27, 2006
Set in the late 1970s, "Heading South" is a socially minded drama about women who grew up with "Beach Blanket Bingo" and turned to Beach Blanket Monopoly at a Haitian resort.
While Haiti buckles under Duvalier's despotism, resort workers on the coast prop up a facade of paradise. The resort serves as a sexual amusement park for a trio of middle-age female North American tourists.
The ladies are whoremongers who ply poor young Haitian men with money, dinners and trinkets. In return, the boys are expected to provide sex, as well as the equally valuable illusion that their benefactors are spring chickens who are still capable of inspiring lust in the cream of the fertile male crop.
French-born Ellen (Charlotte Rampling) works as a professor in Boston and rules over the beach like a feisty seagull, swooping down to scoop up any bauble that catches her eye. She despises men, as well as the girls she teaches who seem to be in college only to land a husband. Her prize boy toy is Legba (Menothy Cesar), her fire-eyed Adonis who appears for enthusiastic, informal exchanges of love and money only to disappear into the night.
Ellen faces unwanted competition in Brenda (Karen Young), a Southerner who has a past with Legba. Also kicking around is Sue (Louise Portal), a Canadian who becomes a bystander in the passive-aggressive Ellen-Brenda rivalry.
The director is Laurent Cantet, a Frenchman whose last film was "Time Out," about a man who is fired from his job but can't bring himself to tell his family. That 2001 movie was compact and decisive, while "Heading South" is more oblique and unfocused. The petty arguments between the wealthy tourists grow tiresome, and there's little depth to any character, especially Legba, who gets involved in frenzied, unexplained chase scenes on city streets.
The most intriguing character by far is Albert (Lys Ambroise), a middle-age hotel manager who seems amiable and content until he delivers a steaming monologue in which he declares his true feelings about the tourists, exclaiming ruefully that his nation is being conquered by invaders with a more powerful weapon than bullets _ dollars.
It's an intriguing concept on which Cantet could have focused. Instead, he's overly focused on cutout characters with frivolous problems.
2.5 stars out of 4.
Rated: Not rated.
Family call: Contains a bit of graphic sex. The film would draw an R rating.
Running time: 108 minutes.
Et cetera: In English and French, with English subtitles.
(Read Phil Villarreal's blog at scrippsnews.com/philmguy and contact him at pvillarreal(at)azstarnet.com.)
