Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche reunited on-screen! As chosen by Uberto Pasolini, their unique charm and familiarity electrifies the still-quirky tale of The Odyssey. The film, called simply “The Return,” is a radical shift from conventional portrayals of Homer’s classic. First, of course, it’s not concerned with mystical landscapes and magical beasts, but instead, Odysseus’ internal state and psychological development. Here, Fiennes plays the title role of Odysseus, with Binoche as Penelope, his loyal and waiting wife. The movie immortalizes her reunion with a sensuous and ecstatic sequence at the temple. It is, suitably, the very place where the two characters first meet.
Fiennes really went for it as Odysseus. His character may have created the look, but he sure perfected it by adding fake glasses and a beard to achieve a more refined appearance. Fiennes lost 40 pounds and underwent significant physical preparation for the role. He dedicated five months to intense training with personal trainer Dan Avasilcai. His aim was the development of the muscular but wiry physique of Odysseus, a human ideal of resilience and endurance. Fiennes had an unusual conception of the character, intending him to look like “a piece of old rope.” He wanted to portray the damage from Odysseus’s arduous and epic journey home.
Pasolini had dreamed of this adaptation for almost 30 years before its eventual release. He gave a new spin to the traditional tale. Rather than put in a pantheon of Greek gods, sirens, and other monsters, he zeroed in on the human experience behind Odysseus’s journey. Pasolini explained, “We were very interested in the simplicity of the elements,” highlighting the fundamental themes of rain, water, sand, soil, fire, and blood. As a psychologist, he wanted to bring out the spiritual and psychological dimensions of Odysseus’s odyssey.
Fiennes is one of our great actors at playing people who struggle with moral ambiguity. Perhaps most recently in our collective memory, he’s appeared as Maurice Bendrix in The End of the Affair and as Cardinal Lawrence in Conclave. Taking on Odysseus gave him tremendous emotional leeway to wrestle with feelings of guilt and personal responsibility. Speaking about his attraction to such roles, Fiennes noted, “I am probably drawn to roles where [there is a] sort of undecided space in someone, where there’s a question mark about who they are and what they’re doing.”
Though their collaboration proved to be short of rocky at first. Pasolini initially contacted Fiennes for the role in 2011 shortly after his directorial debut with “Coriolanus.” Binoche, on the other hand, was a little more reluctant at first but did accept the role opposite Fiennes. In a recent interview Fiennes reflected on her choice to come on board the project. As Juliette told me, her instincts about what she would do and wouldn’t do are very strong. So when she accepted, it was great feeling of coming full circle.
Despite not sharing much screen time together, Fiennes and Binoche share a deep friendship that has endured over the years. Their camaraderie extended beyond the set, with Binoche joining Fiennes for dinner in Plymouth during his tour of England’s regional theatres with a recital of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” in 2022. This deep off-screen connection brought a genuine depth to their on-screen depiction of Odysseus and Penelope.
Pasolini’s vision for The Return was to create a much more realistic depiction of Odysseus’s story. For Odysseus, yes, but more importantly he wanted audiences to feel the daunting arrogance and doubt of the raw human experience as Odysseus encounters it. Reflecting on Fiennes’s physical transformation for the role, Pasolini admitted, “At the beginning, I have to confess, I was slightly suspicious that there was so much protein going in and so much exercise that we would have a body that looked exercised instead of a body that was consumed, a lived body.”
Fiennes’s immersion into the character went beyond the physical. The actor discovered that he was personally affected by Odysseus’s journey, and how much it reflected his own life experience. “It moved me. It moved me as Odysseus and moved me as Ralph,” he expressed. This emotional link to the character undoubtedly fueled his performance, creating layers and depth in every choice he made on screen.