Homer’s Odyssey Meets Cinema Magic: Ralph Fiennes & Juliet Binoche In The Return!
A Conversation with Dr. Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow, Clare College, Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture.
As audiences prepare for the release of The Return, a minimalist adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, anticipation grows for how this classic tale of longing, perseverance, and reunion will unfold on the big screen. With its focus on Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, this film diverges from the sprawling adventures and epic battles of Homer’s narrative, honing in instead on the emotional core of the hero’s journey home.
To explore the film’s interpretation and the enduring resonance of the Odyssey, Richard Marranca spoke with Dr. Paul Cartledge, celebrated historian and expert on ancient Greece. In the discussion, Dr. Cartledge delves into the complexities of Odysseus, the epic's rich tapestry of human and divine encounters, and the challenges of translating such a monumental work for modern audiences. From the timeless lessons of Ithaca to the broader implications of Homer’s narrative on Greek identity and storytelling, this conversation offers a fascinating lens through which to view Pasolini's bold cinematic vision.
Why does Homer’s Odyssey continue to speak to us across centuries, and how do Fiennes and Binoche embody the mythic roles of Odysseus and Penelope? Read on to uncover the wisdom of one of history’s greatest epics and the profound truths it still holds for us today.
RM: I’ve read that the film has the scene of a naked, desolate Odysseus returning to Ithaca. Odysseus is alone and needs to save his family and his kingdom. The film focuses on the return, but aren't we going to miss all the battles, adventures, seductions?
PC. Typical of a movie! Yes, in The Odyssey (book 6, as later scholars divided the poem up for convenience of reference) there is a scene in which Odysseus is found stark naked – by princess Nausicäa on the magic island kingdom of Phaeacia. Embarrassing – for Odysseus, not the princess. But… by the time he returns to his homeland kingdom, the small, rocky and not nearly so well-favored island of Ithaca, he’s fully clothed (if disguised in rags as a beggar by his patron goddess Athena!).
No battles during the nostos (‘return’ – whence ‘nostalgia’) but plenty of adventures for Odysseus and (to begin with) his often disobedient men, including murders and near-murders (think only of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, the Cyclops), and at least a couple of juicy seductions – of, not by, Odysseus: first by witch-goddess Circe, who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs preparatory to cooking and eating them; Odysseus heroically saves them but only at the ‘cost’ of sleeping with Circe. Then there’s my favorite character in both the epics, another goddess-enchantress, Calypso – who managed to ‘hold’ Odysseus, against his will allegedly, on her island for seven whole years, until Hermes, messenger of Zeus (he who shall be obeyed) tells her to let him go. She releases him tearfully, and he builds a raft, allegedly just dying to be on his way again to get back to faithful wife Penelope whom he’s not seen for getting on for 20 years. But … one does wonder. Seven years???
RM: Uberto Pasolini, who directed ‘The Return’ (set to open in early December), said that Homer’s Odyssey spoke to him in his childhood. Why does it still speak to us today?
PC: All human, non-human, and inhuman life is there! It’s THE classic picaresque tale, of journeying, wonders, marvels, thrills and spills, and a quest (return) finally –epically – fulfilled. I read it first in an abridged, English children’s version aged 8. (Since then I’ve read all 24 books, 12,000 lines, more than once in the original Greek.) I adored it straight off. Wept buckets when Odysseus’s 20-year-old hunting hound expired on smelling (he’d become blind with age) his master again. From a more professional point of view, it’s an extended lesson in Greekness – what it means to be Greek, how to be Greek: how to worship the gods and goddesses, how to interact with one’s fellow Greeks or non-Greeks, and how NOT to behave properly, as did the 108 suitors challenging for the hand of Penelope and abusing their host’s involuntary hospitality (as Paris, prince of Troy had abused his host Menelaus’s in the prelims to the Iliad by abducting Queen Helen).
All this at a time, the 8 th and 7 th centuries, when real Greeks were spreading out from the Aegean basin and mainland Greece and settling permanently among (often against) non-Greeks as far as south Italy, southern France, south-east Spain, and North Africa in the west and south, and as far north and east as what’s now Georgia at the far eastern end of the Black Sea. A parallel tale of exploration in the Black Sea is Jason and the Argonauts, but the Odyssey looks west, one of the main reasons why the epic poets chose to focus on Odysseus from Ithaca. (Not the only one of course – it was, e.g., his idea to build the Trojan horse – a tale told not in the Iliad but the Odyssey.)
RM: Do you like Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche playing Odysseus and Penelope? They are really magnificent in The English Patient. (I haven’t seen their Wuthering Heights.)
PC: I agree on their performances in The English Patient (a tale containing an interesting riff on Herodotus and some of his erotic stories), not so much in Wuthering Heights (I prefer the original – both novel and movie). Fiennes is adept at playing characters from cultures and times other than his own, so a good fit for Odysseus whose first Homeric epithet ‘polutropos’ can mean ‘of many turns/twists’ or ‘of many wiles’. I last saw Binoche on stage in London, playing Antigone – for which she was far too old (Sophocles’s Antigone princess of Thebes, a fictitious character of course, would have been about 13 or 14)! Odysseus would, according to ancient Greek norms, have been older than Penelope (a Spartan girl like Helen), perhaps by as much as 10 years, so let’s say that by the time he got back to Ithaca after two decades away he was in his mid-40s, and Penelope in her mid- to late 30s. Actually Binoche is now 60, and Fiennes 61, but their ‘troubles’ could well have aged Penelope and Odysseus by many years…
RM: I just read that it’s a minimalist adaptation. I can understand why it would be near impossible to include all the adventures and characters. But minimalist seems – well, minimal. Is that the only way to create a Homer film? Why is it so hard to bring Homer to the big screen? Have you seen past adaptations?
PC: Minimalism’s a mixed blessing, chacun à son gout. The Odyssey is anything but minimalist or minimal. I’m slightly allergic to all ‘adaptations’ of ancient Greek myths. Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 Troy was at best ‘about’ the siege and fall of that city. But the writer (David Benioff) for some reason best known to him and the Director couldn’t resist killing off the Greeks’ supreme leader, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, at Troy. At a stroke that did away with Agamemnon’s nostos from Troy to Greece, together with his human conquest and enslaved possession princess Cassandra, and the lethal consequences. Homer has the earliest version of Agamemnon’s murder: it was done, as one would have predicted, by Aegisthus, adulterous boyfriend of wife Clytemnestra (sister of Helen…). But when we read or watch Athenian poet-playwright Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon of 458 BC, we find it’s not Aegisthus but Clytemnestra who – with the aid of a net, an axe and a bath - does the filthy deed. Horrors, for that sets in train the avenging counter-murder of Clytemnestra by son Orestes, which in its turn raises the issue of blood-guilt… And so it goes.
However, I can see why even a Pasolini (great cinematic name!) might tremble at the thought of a ‘realist’ version of The Odyssey – the mixture of types of personage (human, immortal, monsters) and of genres and locales of interaction would have been quite daunting to attempt (impossibly) reproduce.
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RM: Can you tell us why Odysseus was at Troy for 10 years and another ten years finding his way home?
PC: Odysseus somewhat reluctantly answered the call put out by Great King Agamemnon (above) for a mega-expedition to Troy to recover his abducted sister-in-law Helen (above) and punish the Trojans collectively for Paris’s crime (encouraged though it had been by Aphrodite, immortal goddess of beauty and sex). Well over 1000 ships were mustered (very few of them supplied by Ithaca), departure was delayed by adverse winds and the ill-omened human sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter (for which he paid with his life ten years later – see above), but eventually the Greeks encamped outside Troy (overlooking the Hellespont/Dardanelles in northwest Turkey today). Why the siege should have taken 10 years is a complete mystery – mainly due to epic-scale exaggeration, probably. The fighting described in the Iliad covered only a few weeks – but was described at ginormous length! One reason why we use ‘epic’ as we do: size can matter. Again, ten years to get Odysseus back from sacked Troy to Ithaca – nonsense, ridiculous. But remember 7 of those 10 were spent by Odysseus alone – alone with Calypso…
RM: What monsters and goddesses do Odysseus encounter?
PC: There’s a famous poem by Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933, he died on his 70 th birthday) called simply ‘Ithaca’:
Early on he refers to Laestrygonians, Cyclopes (plural of Cyclops), and wild/angry Poseidon. The Laestrygonians were a bestial tribe of man-eating giants. Ditto at least one of the Cyclopes (mentioned above). Both groups were said to be descended, physically, from sea- and earthquake-god Poseidon, a full brother of Zeus, who was livid when Odysseus cunningly blinded Polyphemus and tried several times over to kill our hero thereafter. Among other non-human/inhuman monsters encountered one might mention the Harpies and Sirens, and Scylla the dog-toothed, all of them female. Calypso, and Circe, both goddesses, have been mentioned above. But Odysseus’s mentor, and savior, was yet another immortal, the grey-eyed (or ox-eyed) Athena. She was more cunning even than Odysseus, and it was she who guided him not only geographically back to his homeland but also in what measures he should take in order to recover his kingdom from the suitors (e.g. going in disguise when back on Ithaca – see above). But Odysseus’s revenge proved to be exceptionally bloody, and one wonders whether the goddess of wisdom would have wholly approved the slaughter.
RM: Odysseus and Penelope are ideals and role models for the audience. She’s also crafty and strong – can you delve into that? They suffer, prevail, flourish again.
PC: I’ve said enough already, I think, about Odysseus – but will just mention one other famous episode, his visit to the Underworld of the Dead and return therefrom! Like Oedipus, but fortunately in a different way, he loved his mother, Anticleia, inordinately. But she had died after Odysseus had left for Troy, so he’d not been able to attend to her funeral rites along with his father Laertes and pay his final respects. As very much a second best, he wanted at least to say a fond farewell to her shade in Hades (the ‘Unseen’ underworld). Which he managed to do, though he found it a difficult experience, as Anticleia, like all the other dead down there, was but a gibbering, squeaking phantom, a shade, nothing much like his mother as he’d remembered her.
Penelope was indeed her husband’s equal in craft, pun intended: she not only was crafty but also was a superb craftswoman. The lie she spun to the suitors was that she would not choose one of the 108 to marry until… she had completed weaving her father-in-law’s winding sheet, his funeral shroud (he was an old man, so that story would in itself have not been unbelievable). Only, every night she undid the work she’d done during the day, so that curiously she made remarkably slow and small progress towards its completion. Then, when Odysseus had finally got back to Ithaca and shed his beggar’s disguise and displayed quite extraordinary skill in archery (as well as butchery) so that she knew perfectly well who he was, even so she still went through a rigmarole variation on the usual encounter between a visiting stranger and his host. She didn’t say – what took you so long, buddy, and btw what the hell did you think you were doing staying with Calypso (and shagging her) for seven long years? No, she asked him what their marriage-bed was like, what physically it was made of, and how. Since Odysseus had made it himself, two decades ago, he was bound not to get that one wrong. Job done. They lived together man and wife happily ever after. (But if so, that would have been almost a first or a unicum for the world of Greek mythology! Consider only the benighted house of Tantalus to which Agamemnon belonged…)
RM: When and how were Homer’s epics created? What is an epic, and what’s an oral epic?
PC: First, let’s deal with the Greek term epos. It’s itself a classic case of minimalism: in ancient Greek epos meant just ‘word’! One word… Not necessarily a big word, either…
It’s been well said that saga (including epic saga) presupposes ruins. The Iliad, a title which tells us that it’s about Ilion/Ilium, another name for Troy, focuses on events immediately preceding the destruction of the major non-Greek city of Troy. Actually, the title’s a misnomer. On the model of The Odyssey (also attributed to ‘Homer’) it should have been called ‘The Achilleid’, because its theme, its leitmotif, is how the anger/rage of Achilles was first caused, what effect that had on his own involvement or non-involvement in the siege of Troy, and how that led to the poem’s climactic death and burial of Trojan champion Hector. It’s an oral epic because it was originally created and sung publicly to audiences over several centuries (c. 1200-700) without the aid of writing. In what is the imagined era of the events of both Homeric epics, what we call the 13 th century BC, there was a system of writing Greek, a syllabary (not an alphabet) called today ‘Linear B’. But that ceased to be in use some time after 1200, and the poets of the Iliad and Odyssey either didn’t know of or deliberately suppressed its existence in the epics.
It is, however, possible, indeed likely, that writing was involved in the composition of the two poems at one crucial, monumental stage: both poems are selections from even bigger stories – the Iliad from ‘The Siege and Destruction of Troy’, the Odyssey from ‘The Destruction of Troy and the Return of the Heroes to Greece’ – so the ‘monumental’ composer or composers (let’s call him or them ‘Homer’) needed to have his selections transcribed if they were to survive as such – as they did! But by the time that was done – and most of us think it was in the later 8 th or earlier 7 th century BC. The Greeks had acquired/created a totally new kind of script, an alphabetic script, which would have made transcribing the poems much easier (though, even so, it would have taken ages to write them down, 15,000 verses and 12,000, longhand, on papyrus sheets….).
RM: How important was the Odyssey to the ancient Greeks?
PC: Extremely – and to all Greeks, men and women and children alike, for the reasons I gave above. Not all Greeks were literate, but in the case of the Homeric epics literacy wasn’t everything, because they could be transmitted, as they had been composed, orally, and learned off by heart. There were even specialist epic-reciters called rhapsodes (literally, stitchers of odes or songs or lays) who competed against each other in prestigious religious festivals open to all-comers, all Hellenophones. Plato’s dialogue Ion is named after one of those.
RM: Years ago, I interviewed E. L. Doctorow, author of Ragtime, The March and other novels. And he said that films encourage us to return to novels. Do you have any favorite Homer translations -- how about the newest one by Emily Wilson?
PC: I’ve read The March – terrific. I’ve also read that there are just 7 (was it?) basic plotlines for all (ever, anywhere) literary inspiration and expansion. Surely the Iliad and the Odyssey between them cover the waterfront. The novel technically was a much later generic invention than the epic, several centuries later, but the Odyssey certainly – the Iliad less so – has many elements that novelists both ancient and modern would employ. Modern verse novels do of course exist – I’m particularly fond of Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate (‘Seth’ rhymes with ‘Gate’!). But almost all novels are written in prose – and there’s the rub: should the Odyssey be translated (only) into verse, and if so what form - rhyming, metrical, or blank? Emily Wilson – praised be her name – goes for the latter, blank verse, the opposite extreme from say Alexander Pope. But for me her ‘verse’ is far too prosaic. I much prefer the un-rhymed verse of the American Robert-s, Fitzgerald and Fagles. But I’m also going to put in a word for a fairly recent English prose translation, that of Walter Shewring.
RM: Is the Odyssey one of the greatest works in the world’s bookcase?
PC: Oh yes, one of. I hope I’ve said enough already to give a good idea of why I think that (though of course originally it wasn’t ’a book’ as such…).
RM: As Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell would say, the journey (an archetype) is integral to any good and great life. What are the lessons of Odysseus and his family, and how is the epic animated in us, in our lives?
PC: You mean, I take it, what lessons for us today – rather than what lessons did the ancient Greeks themselves draw? If so, I’d refer readers once again to the uber-wise Cavafy’s Ithaca, which ends (translations differ!):
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
You’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
[trans. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard]
In other words, my words, travel hopefully but guardedly, unheroically, don’t expect to find a holy grail, a crock of gold, at the end of a rainbow. Make the most of what you experience, bad as well as good, en route. That in itself is richness enough.
The film The Return is on general release in the United States from Dec 6th.
Top image: "Now he's left to pine on an island, wracked with grief" (Odyssey V): Calypso and Odysseus, by Arnold Böcklin, 1883. Inset; The Return (2024) poster Source: Public Domain Inset; Bleecker Street / Red Wave Films / HanWay Films / Heretic / Picomedia / Rai Cinema / Kabo Films / Marvelous Production
By Richard Marranca, Ph.D.
Looking forward to seeing it. Thanks for the great insight into The Odyssey. It's so fascinating, and each time I become enamored with it, I seem to pick up more.
I have seen Pasolini's "The Return" and I think it is the best adaption of Odyssey, because it does without any monster or divine intervention, like a real story could have been. As that he could prevail over a dozen of suitors, but not (even with some help) over of more than a hundred of them. The rest, as narrated by Homer, could have been cunning Odysseus' version to justify his lone and unglorious return.