Movie Review: HEADING SOUTH (2006)
Heading South – ***1/2
A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of The Last King of Scotland. The film was superb, but dissimilar in many ways from the film Heading South. Yet while watching Laurent Cantet’s drama of sexual colonization in 1970s Haiti, I couldn’t get The Last King of Scotland out of my head.
Even with an Academy Award nomination, The Last King of Scotland can’t gain an audience, I assume, because the film doesn’t give us a happy ending. Likewise, or should I say more so, Heading South has the same problem. The dilemma, however, ensures that the film’s textured characters and complex political subtext make Heading South worthy of seeking out.
Brenda (Karen Young) came to Haiti for one reason. To find and have sex with the same Haitian boy she slept with three years ago. The boy Legba (Ménothy Cesar) is now around eighteen and has used his muscular physique and charming good looks to woo middle-aged white women into giving him money and presents.
One of those women is Ellen (Charlotte Rampling). She’s the grande dame of the resort and Legba’s main consort. Brenda is at first threatened by Ellen’s relationship with Legba, but soon decides to throw her own wealth and personality around. As the two women compete for the young man’s attention, neither knows the trouble he faces in the Haiti that exists outside of the resort.
For anyone even partially familiar with Haiti’s tumultuous history, you understand how hard it would be to make a film set in the Caribbean nation that isn’t political. Heading South never tries to achieve otherwise, but instead opts for large-scale, geopolitical metaphors.
Those metaphors, involving Europeans who learn from their exploitation and an American who doesn’t, only amplify the characters and provide grand inspiration for the actors. Charlotte Rampling gives an especially stirring performance as a school teacher who spends her vacations seeking the company of young Haitian men. Her silent, cold exterior is carried with a haunting sentimentality. It’s something other actors have a hard time achieving but Rampling can do without little effort.
The only downside to Heading South is realizing most people, like me, will experience it for the first time on DVD. The film never made it into more than 26 American theatres. While I still don’t see much of an audience for an intellectually demanding melodrama in the DVD market, anyone yearning for true art house fare should look out for Heading South. It certainly fills the void that most studio-produced, faux-art house films never can.
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