Heading South
Directed by Laurent Cantet
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There’s a scene in Heading South in which Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), a 50-something white tourist at a Haitian beach resort, stops rubbing lotion into the skin of the local black youth lying naked and facedown on her bed — she wants to take a picture. And so she lines up his limber, compliant form in the viewfinder like she would any other splash of local color, and snaps. For director and co-writer Laurent Cantet, sex tourism is the most naked manifestation of exploitation along class/racial/national lines: at the whim of the privileged, with the cooperation of the underprivileged (it beats their other options). But Cantet, a normally perceptive sociologist, loses the plot about the time his female characters start to lose their perspective. He pushes a rivalry between queen bee Ellen and Southern naïf Brenda (Karen Young), with their never-referred-to-as-such gigolo Legba (Menothy Cesar), the vacant point in the triangle, in order to underscore their ignorance of Haiti outside their affluent bubble; but surely reducing Charlotte Rampling to a groveling, self-deluding jungle fever patient is more vindictive than incisive?
Opens July 7 at Angelika Film Center
Opens July 7 at Angelika Film Center
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