Laurent Cantet's 'Heading South'

Sexual shopping or menopausal marketing?
Laurent Cantet's Heading South

ROBERT ZALLER

Laurent Cantet’s Heading South has been the summer’s catnip film for women of a certain age. Set in the seedy Haiti of Baby Doc Duvalier, it follows three middle-aged American women— Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), Sue (Karen Young) and Brenda (Louise Portal)— who return like homing pigeons to a private resort where they have found personal paradise in the form of the young Haitian beachcombers who service them, no questions asked and no donation refused. The whole place is set up as a fantasy island where the women can cruise at their leisure, take their pick of the available talent and imagine themselves as the objects of love and desire from the boys they patronize.

If this were the scenario of a stag film, as well it might be with the genders reversed, there would be little to narrate: Men rarely misunderstand whores. But our women don’t merely wish to gratify desire; they wish to be desired, or at least to enjoy the illusion of it. This creates conflict when Ellen and Sue battle for the favors of the handsome Legba (Ménthony César), who, for his own part, is unhelpfully willing to pleasure both. His reaction honors the unwritten rule of the inn: Men can be used, but not owned— which means that any exchange of sentiment is temporary.

An orgasm remembered

Sue discovers this fact of paradise as a rude jolt. An attractive, vaguely damaged woman in her late 40s, she is paying a return trip to the resort after a lapse of three years, when Legba had given Sue her very first orgasm. The memory of that grand event has grown in magnitude for her, especially as it has not been repeated, and— as is the not infrequent case when one revisits past scenes of bliss— she expects everything to be exactly as before. She knows now that she loves Legba, and, of course, that he will love her.

Time, however, waits for no woman, and Legba is now the boy toy of Ellen, the acknowledged queen of the hive. Worse, Legba apparently has no recollection of Sue and their grand moment together. Ellen observes Sue’s discomfiture with lofty amusement, but Sue turns the house rule against her. If Sue cannot have Legba to herself, she can have her own time share in him. Legba obliges; and it is now Ellen’s turn to suffer, for, as apparently everyone realizes but Ellen herself, she is in love with him.

And now for a socio/political message

This is a plot with no hope but a tawdry ending; even an actress of Rampling’s skill cannot hope to pull off the Bette Davis scene that awaits her. But director Cantet also has a social message for us.

In the film’s first scene, a Haitian mother desperately pushes her nubile daughter at a well-dressed gentleman at the airport and begs him to take her. He gravely declines, and as we follow him we discover he is not the well-to-do businessman he has been taken for, but Albert (Lys Ambroise), the manager of the resort, and his errand is to pick up the arriving Sue. Albert is thus a bridge between two worlds, the brutal one of native misery and Baby Doc’s goons, and the fantasyland over which he presides.

Legba, too, lives in both these worlds: as a slum child with a widowed mother who frets over him, a role model for neighborhood youth, and a patriot who, under his complaisant and winning exterior, seethes with resentment at the dictatorship and its presumed American patrons. It is this larger dimension that sets the women’s sexual slumming in its imperial context, and exposes its dark underside.

Of course, Ellen, Sue and Brenda (who seems rather an afterthought in the script) are pioneers in what has now become a global sex trade: East European slave girls, pedophile tours of Thailand, African peacekeepers, etc. They exude, too, the innocence of pioneers, who know not what they really do.

Calling Graham Greene and Billy Wilder

Graham Greene would have made this all come out with suitable irony, but Cantet wants to have his cake and eat it, too: soft porn for the ladies, and social criticism for the art set. The two halves of Legba’s life are never integrated in a believable character, and Albert remains a mere functionary— the sort of discreet maitre d’ who doesn’t question his customers’ tastes and always cleans up in the morning. When the inevitable tragedy strikes, Ellen goes home bereft, and Sue— now a confirmed predator— decides to root around in the Caribbean for new adventures, a little like Hannibal Lecter at the end of Silence of the Lambs. Neither has learned anything, except about their respective narcissisms.

The popularity of this film shows the shrewdness of marketing to a menopausal demographic. Exit surveys showed female patrons let down in their hope of sexual titillation: Sorry, girls, there’s a back side to Legba, but no front. The political eyewash and the presence of Charlotte Rampling got it into the first-run art houses, but Heading South is merely slumming in every sense of the word. A real film about sex tourism has yet to be made. Billy Wilder, can you hear me?