Waves crash across Ithaca’s rocky shore. “The city of Troy has fallen,” we are told, as the shuttle on Penelope’s loom flickers across the screen. “On the island of Ithaca, Queen Penelope still longs for the return of her husband Odysseus.” The camera then cuts to the wreckage of a ship and the body of a man washed up on the beach – naked, dishevelled, scarred.
This is the beginning of the new Odyssey-inspired film starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, The Return.
The Odyssey, the ancient Greek epic poem ascribed to the poet Homer, charts the return home of its eponymous hero, Odysseus. For half the epic poem, we follow the hero as he struggles, sometimes against fantastical monsters and goddesses, sometimes against himself and his crew, to return.
