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Heading South
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 26 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 13 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Foreign
Written by:
Robin Campillo
Laurent Cantet
Dany Laferrière (novel La Chair du Maître and short stories)
Directed by: Laurent Cantet
Release Date:
Theatrical: July 7, 2006
DVD: February 6, 2007
Running Time: 107 minutes, Color
Origin: France / Canada
Language(s): French / English (with English subtitles)
Summary
RATING: Not Rated
Starring Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, Louise Portal, Ménothy Cesar, Lys Ambroise, Jackenson Pierre Olmo Diaz, Wilfried Paul, and Anotte Saint Ford
On the sun drenched island of Haiti in the '70s, foreigners idle away their vacations in the palm-fringed paradise of the beach hotels. Brenda (Young), Ellen (Rampling) and Sue (Portal), three North American women, converge on the island looking for flirtation, relaxation and respite from their colorless jobs and marriages. They find what they are looking for in Legba (Cesar), an enigmatic local Adonis whose beauty and passion has them enthralled. It is this passion that will lead them away from the gilded cage of tourism and will open their eyes to the poverty stricken and dangerous world of Haiti. (Celluloid Dreams)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Human Resources Time Out
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Film Threat Phil Hall
Cantet weaves a dark, disturbing story of hedonism, casual racism and the lethal consequences of self-indulgence in his superb drama Heading South.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
A beautifully written, seamlessly directed film with award-worthy performances by Ms. Rampling and Ms. Young.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Heading South is a hydra-headed love story, as dangerous as it is heated and complex.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
A pleasurably unsettling, sunbaked tale of sex and politics set in late-1970s Haiti.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Director Laurent Cantet's fourth feature abandons the contentious French workplaces of "Human Resources" and "Time Out" for sunnier climes, but this Haitian idyll is an equally excoriating look at labor and exploitation.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
The movie itself is a powerful cocktail of not just sex and love but race, poverty, colonialism and jealousy.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Boasts another formidable and fine-tuned performance from the great Charlotte Rampling.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Laurent Cantet's fascinating, troubling drama has many meanings.
Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Heading South is a seemingly straightforward and simple picture that's really defiantly complex, sexually, politically and emotionally.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
In its way, the film is a piercing indictment, though it makes its point without much screaming, hectoring or preening. It's quietly terrific.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
The film offers something unusual, a tragic spectacle of normal, recognizable and utterly sympathetic people condemning themselves.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Heading South is strong in bursts, but the bursts are too diffuse for its best moments to last.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
The racial and sexual politics of Heading South may trouble some audiences; Cantet is definitely not a moralist in the usual sense.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
If only Cantet and Robin Campillo (who based their screenplay on stories by Dany Lafèrriere) had balanced the sexual and political elements more acutely, the result could have been searing.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
An absorbing extension of Cantet's abiding obsession with the seeding of political inequality in intimate relations.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
The film tackles more than it can master, but it's never less than fascinating, and all three leads are exceptional.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
An intelligent movie, not so much salacious as affecting but ultimately less analytical than overwrought, Heading South makes its points in the first 20 minutes.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Provocative and prodding, but apart from its queen bee Ellen (the marvelous Rampling), the characters are representational types instead of fleshed-out human beings.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Cantet does something that educated, upscale audiences may find exasperating in the extreme: He takes a tinderbox of racial and sexual exploitation, pours gasoline all over it, and refuses to light the match.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
Lonely, bitter, insecure and clearly unstable, the women are meant to level the emotional playing field and add depth to what is, at heart, a story about the exploitation of poor nations by rich and powerful ones. But they wind up being too bitter and unstable to elicit much sympathy.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett
Cantet keeps a lid on a story that he could have easily exploited, but he makes his points about beauty, fulfillment, self-indulgence and delusion with a measured hand.
Read Full Review >Variety Jay Weissberg
Cantet's anticipated follow-up to "Time Out" supplants that pic's important issues with unexamined attitudes toward sex and the tropics.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
Heading South's gender politics keep the movie from being too simple, since these women's self-indulgence can be read as a kind of unfettered (and even laudable) feminism, instead of just unintentional racism.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Among the creepiest adult monologues you'll hear in a regular theater this year comes from Karen Young in Heading South, a well-acted but misguided tale of displaced sexual longing on the beaches of Baby Doc Duvalier's 1970s Haiti.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Bill White
Rampling is fascinating as Ellen, the aging romantic who hardens her vulnerability with a materialist philosophy regarding the buying and selling of sex. The other two actresses give more superficial performances, with Young totally unconvincing as a Southern neurotic.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 13 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Fred M. gave it a10:
The film's theme - middle age female sexual tourists in the hellish Haiti of the 1970s - will undoubtedly be misunderstood by those seeking a conventional fantasy island romance or a political thriller. The story develops in a rather simplistic way presenting its characters without being judgmental at a pace commesurable to the island life. Its portrait of white women in their 50s paying poor young black men for sex and the murderous brutality of the Haitian political regime is presented realistically without melodrama. It is refreshing to see a film attempting to capture life in Haiti as it really was without resorting to Hollywood fakery and not being afraid of presenting older women driven by sexual desire.
Stuart S. gave it an8:
This film is about sex but if you think this is a "sexy" film you will be surprised. A profound look about a subject I knew nothing about in a world before the AIDS crisis.
Ken G. gave it a4:
Nothing really works here. Much of film is simply too dull, and talky, with little going on, until it makes a belated, and rather clumsy attempt to drag itself into thriller territory late in the story. Also, the characters aren't really well drawn, (accept for Rampling). Young's character is seriously underwritten. You get little sense that anyone was giving much thought to her character, as she almost comes off as a silly romance novel heroine, as the lonely woman, feverishly determined to recapture the lone organism of her live, with her dream lover. Please, couldn't they have just made her a woman looking to reconnect with the guy she had great sex with? And her "dream lover" is too much of a blank page to make it believable that both Young and Rampling would be madly in love with him. The fact that he was a blank page, might have been filmmaker's point. That the women didn't care who he was, they just wanted to use him. But it doesn't work. And the plump French woman, just seems to be hanging around the movie for no particular reason. The filmmakers simply weren't as interested in developing their story and characters, as they were in delivering messages about women, sexual tourism, exploitation, and colonization.
Je B. gave it a3:
Great actors, fascinating location--terrible script. So bad, it's laughable. No believable characters. These over 40 women have no lives. Apparently, their only pleasure is screwing young black men. Dialogue that makes one's eyes roll to the back of the head. Was hoping for a political film about Haiti in the 70s. This is a film made by aging males with an ax to grind.
Ken G. gave it a4:
Nothing really works here. Much of film is simply too dull, and talky, with little going on, until it makes a belated, and rather clumpsy attempt to drag itself into thriller territory late in the story. Also, the characters aren't really well drawn, (accept for Rampling). Young's character is seriously underwritten. You get little sense that anyone was giving much thought to her character, as she almost comes off as a silly romance novel heroine, as the lonely woman, feverishly determined to recapture the lone organism of her live, with her dream lover. Please, couldn't they have just made her a woman looking to reconnect with the guy she had great sex with? And her "dream lover" is too much of a blank page to make it believeable that both Young and Rampling would be madly in love with him. The fact that he was a blank page, might have been filmmaker's point. That the women didn't care who he was, they just wanted to use him. But it doesn't work. And the plump French woman, just seems to be hanging around the movie for no particular reason. The filmmakers simply weren't as interested in developing their story and characters, as they were in delivering messages about women, sexual tourism, exploitation, and colonization.
Je B. gave it a3:
great actors, fascinating locatiion--terrible script. so bad, it's laughable. no believeable characters. these over 40 women have no lives. apparently, their only pleasure is screwing young black men. dialogue that makes one's eyes roll to the back of the head. was hoping for a political film abt. Haiti in the 70s. this is a film made by aging males with an ax to grind.
George R. gave it a2:
great fertile material, excavated wonderfully for the first forty minutes and then it completely pooped out on itself, becoming laughably bad. more like an essay than a compelling narrative. and then more like pure nonsense than a movie. pity - the theater was packed with disappointed hopefuls, spurred on by critics.
