Returning to Greece with the historical drama “The Return” proved an emotional affair for Juliette Binoche, Ralph Fiennes and director-producer Uberto Pasolini. “Meeting this dream, this need inside Uberto and his passion for the story… We were really moved,” said Binoche before bursting into tears alongside her co-star and director at the film’s press conference at the Thessaloniki Film Festival.
“It was moving because that is what you wish for as an actor,” continued Binoche with a quavering voice, while a visibly teary-eyed Pasolini sat alongside her. “We know how difficult it is [to get a film made]. When we had [Pasolini] go home with the hard drives he could work with and complete this wish, it felt like we were okay. We’re okay.”
“The Return,” based on Homer’s ancient Greek poem “Odyssey,” is a passion project 30 years in the making for the “Still Life” and “Nowhere Special” director, best known as the Oscar-nominated producer of “The Full Monty.” In the epic, Fiennes plays Odysseus as he washes up on the shores of his home island of Ithaca after 20 years of fighting in the Trojan War. Binoche plays Penelope, Odysseus’ wife who spent two decades defending the family’s legacy and now finds herself a prisoner in her own home.
Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes both received an honorary Golden Alexander award at a screening of “The English Patient” during the Thessaloniki Film Festival.
Courtesy of Thessaloniki Film Festival
“Working with Juliette and Ralph, most of the time you say action and you just watch and watch and watch because it is extraordinary. They give you something more complex than you could ever have dreamed of,” Pasolini said. “When you’re making a film, you live for these moments. It reminds you of what Bergman said, that the most beautiful thing to look at is the face. When these two faces communicate like they do in this film, it’s a blessing.”
The actors are also at the Thessaloniki Film Festival as the recipients of this year’s Golden Alexander award for their respective bodies of work, which includes two other collaborations in “The English Patient” and “Wuthering Heights.” Speaking about their reunion 28 years after Anthony Minghella’s Oscar-winning film, Binoche calls it “destiny.”
“Sharing the story with Ralph was very special because we’ve known each other for many years and are probably coming to an age where you see that it could be our last film,” she added, with Fiennes saying, “We’ve stayed very good friends throughout the years and felt this was the right thing. As [Juliette] said, it was destiny. It felt so right that we would come together in this tale of a man and woman coming back together.”
When asked how pertinent her portrayal of Penelope felt for contemporary women, Binoche called her character “a very modern woman even though she is an archetype.” “She is not the submissive wife, she has her own journey in a sort of desperation. The patience that that woman had to have for him to come back is huge, and if we can make a parallel with what is happening in the world right now, the feminine side of ourselves has to wish that this need to conquer will change, will transform. I can take the story of Ulysses as a story about the female and male sides of ourselves that need to reunite.”
“You can read the story on so many levels,” she continued. “This is why this film is modern even though it is a classic. Even more modern today than it was at the time.”
One audience member wove yet another parallel between the film and real life by mentioning how Penelope could stand for arthouse film and the many suitors who tried to shake her intent could be seen as those standing in the way of getting independent films made. To this, Fiennes said that “we get quite trapped in these labels of arthouse versus commercial. This seems to me like an old language and I hope the younger generation of filmmakers who are forging the cinema of tomorrow don’t fall into this binary trap.”
He continued by saying he hopes up-and-coming filmmakers create “an infrastructure and a way of talking with audiences which stops this, so in a cinema, you can have what we might call arthouse films and commercial films playing alongside each other. I think it would be great to break this barrier.”
Pasolini returned to Fiennes’ comment later in the conversation when asked about the effect of streamers, saying we should look at storytelling as a “continuum” and that streamers are confirming that certain things “will attract fewer people, others will attract more.”
“Streamers are helping expose films that have not received theatrical distribution in certain countries. Perhaps Mubi is more interested in a particular cinema than Netflix, but I think they are helping [while] still believing cinema should be watched on a big screen amongst other people.”
On returning to Greece, where part of the film was shot before production was moved to locations in Italy, Fiennes said he found Ithaca to be a “very powerful place” and Greece “an extraordinary country.” “There is some energy or power that I identify in its islands, its seascape and mountains. I feel the same on the West Coast of Ireland. It is very powerful to feel these spirits.”
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