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Heading South
Celluloid Dreams


7.0

based on 26 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 13 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

FILM:

MPAA 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)

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:	DVD: February 6, 2007 Theatrical: July 7, 2006
RUNNING TIME:	107 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	France / Canada
LANGUAGE(S):	French / English (with English subtitles)

Original title "Vers le Sud"; Cinema for Peace Award and Marcello Mastroianni Award, 2005 Venice Film Festival

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...

100

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.

100

The New York Times Stephen Holden

A beautifully written, seamlessly directed film with award-worthy performances by Ms. Rampling and Ms. Young.

100

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Heading South is a hydra-headed love story, as dangerous as it is heated and complex.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

A pleasurably unsettling, sunbaked tale of sex and politics set in late-1970s Haiti.

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.

New York Post Kyle Smith

The movie itself is a powerful cocktail of not just sex and love but race, poverty, colonialism and jealousy.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Boasts another formidable and fine-tuned performance from the great Charlotte Rampling.

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.

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

The film offers something unusual, a tragic spectacle of normal, recognizable and utterly sympathetic people condemning themselves.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Heading South is strong in bursts, but the bursts are too diffuse for its best moments to last.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Evocative and disturbing.

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.

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.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

An absorbing extension of Cantet's abiding obsession with the seeding of political inequality in intimate relations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Heading South Celluloid Dreams

Heading South
Celluloid Dreams