Heading South (Vers le sud)
Laurent Cantet

Philip Cunliffe
posted 30 June 2006

Laurent Cantet has claimed his film is about 'love tourism' not sex tourism. It is an awkward and ugly neologism, but it captures something of the ambiguity and novelty of his film.

The setting is not contemporary South East Asia but 1970s Haiti, and the characters seeking sex and sun are not dirty old men, but three middle-aged, middle-class North American women. The grubbiness of rich Westerners buying intimacy in the Third World is still very much present in the images of leathery Western women with their sagging, turkey-wattle necks draping themselves over muscular young black men. For all their unsettling, predatory aspects, the Western women characters are sympathetically drawn and superbly acted. Each gets a chance to tell her story, through the surprisingly effective device of a monologue spoken directly to the camera. Sure enough, their stories reveal that they are travelling to Haiti to flee dead-end marriages and twilight careers, and the misery of libidos that are as strong as ever, but can find no outlet back home in Boston, Savannah and Montreal.

But the film is more than just a 'frank' portrayal of feminine middle-aged sexuality. It is also a study in the subtle and tender brutality with which power can be exercised. The Adonis-like Legba, brilliantly played by non-professional Mênothy Cesar, enjoys the freedom of the beaches frequented by the Western women, as well as enjoying their bedrooms. But he doesn't know how to respond to the affections of his former sweetheart, now living in a gilded cage as the mistress of a senior figure in the regime. The roses and gifts of her lover are a like 'a machine gun in the back of your neck', she tells Legba.

It is testimony to the strength of Cantet's screenplay and directing that he manages to explore the ambiguity of how sex and intimacy stretches over the gulf between the poor and rich, the weak and powerful. The truly seamy side of the film lies not in the tale of sexual exploitation, but in the tourists' breathtaking insouciance and ignorance of the reality of Haiti under 'Baby Doc' Duvalier's dictatorship. 'Welcome to paradise', says Ellen (played by Charlotte Rampling), to newcomer Brenda. Ellen is the most cynical, haughty and hard-bitten of the three women, who tells herself she has no illusions about what she wants from Haiti. But she still can't bear to pay Legba directly, instead slipping the money into his pocket.

As Ellen vies with Brenda for Legba's attention, her jealousy eventually erupts into a matriarchal fantasy of taking Lebga back home, and enslaving him as a live-in gigolo. The depth of her self-centredness becomes apparent when she believes she is directly responsible for the film's tragic climax, hectoring the Haitian police in complete ignorance of the murderous political regime that exists beyond the hotel gates.