THE RETURN**

THE RETURN is an earnest but overly attenuated retelling of the closing act of the Greek myth Odysseus. A fully shredded Ralph Fiennes stars as the king who abandoned his people for a decade long siege of Troy and then an epic years-long sea voyage home.  When we meet him he is washed up naked on his home island, hiding his true identity through shame that he returned when so many of his soldiers died.   Meanwhile his wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche) is being harassed to take another husband among the many foreign raiders who are pillaging her lands.

We do not see the spousal reunion until around 45 minutes into the film and it's an acting tour de force.  Odysseus refuses to reveal his identity but Penelope has figured it out and asks searching questions of him - why did he abandon his family? Why did he take so long to come home? War? What Is It Good For? etc.  We then spend an hour derping around the island as their son is on the run from the raiders, before the climactic bow and arrow scene in which Aragorn, sorry Odysseus, reclaims his bride, and goes Full Tonto on his rivals.

That one deeply moving reunion scene aside, this film is desperately slow. Thanks to some pretty pedestrian direction from Uberto Pasolini (STILL LIFE), it feels as though each scene is wading through molasses, and Odysseus stringing his bow seems to take an age.  I feel like there is a really good 60 minute cut of this film that is more engrossing and less repetitive. I mean, how many times do we really need to be told that Penelope is being forced to take a husband? I couldn't shake the feeling that this was all just an excuse for Ralph Fiennes to get buff, naked, and drenched in blood.  Maybe he longs for a role in Vikings?

THE RETURN is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes. It was released on Prime Video earlier this month.

STILL LIFE

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To some of the marketing, one might think Uberto Pasolini's new film STILL LIFE is a quirky romantic comedy starring the maid from Donwton Abbey.  But it's something far more interesting: a patient, elegiac wryly observed drama about a lonely man who does his best for those forgotten by society.  He's charged by the local council with finding the families of the people who die alone and unloved, and if he can't, he uses what he has pieced together of their lives to give them a touching funeral, attended only by him.  This man, Mr May, is a gentleman in every sense of the world, but he's become detached from life, in a well-ordered but solitude existence. As we watch him delicately pick his way through the lives of others we see clearly the trajectory he is on, and wonder how conscious he is of it: that he too will die alone, unloved and perhaps undiscovered.