Life Done Right™

Heading South (Vers Le Sud)

Story:

The setting is a beach resort in late 70s Haiti, where middle-aged North American women go to be sexually pampered by young black men, rewarding them with economic and quasi-maternal favours. ‘Welcome to Paradise’, says the resort’s alpha female Ellen (Rampling) to newcomer Brenda (Young), but it’s clear that this is anything but paradise. Outside the hotel’s artificial bubble, the Duvalier regime is in power, and it can’t be long before Legba (César), the young man favoured by both Ellen and Sue (Portal), falls foul of the all-powerful Macoute militia.

Basing their script on three stories by the Haitian writer Dany Laferrière, Cantet and regular co-writer Robin Campillo sensitively but trenchantly look into a complex nexus of sexual and political issues. Among the cast of this gripping, compact drama, Karen Young is terrific as the vulnerable Brenda, while as the ambivalent, possessive, highly knowing Ellen, Charlotte Rampling rides her current career renaissance with cool, abrasive brilliance.

From the director: “Physical desire and sex, as a political metaphor, seemed to me to be the fundamental element, something extraordinary, because, in a society where the relationships between social classes are so terrifying, where the gap between the rich and the poor is so huge, where humiliation, disdain, contempt for others is so intense, the only thing that can bring one particular person closer to another is physical desire. I’m not describing an innocent form of sexuality, but sexuality as an instrument of political, social, or economic power. We’re dealing with a small group of very rich people who can buy anything, or who think they can buy anything, people or objects, and with others who are ready to sell the only thing they possess, their youth and their body. I wanted to find out if in this exchange, in this trade, where flesh meets flesh, there wasn’t something more.”