Exploring female desire in a way films rarely do, Heading South is a film of sometimes subtle, sometimes blunt metaphors for the interaction of rich and pauperized countries.
Heading South (2006)
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Reviews Counted:21
Fresh:15
Rotten:6
Average Rating:6.9/10
Consensus: As touching as it is disturbing, Heading South is an unconventional exploration of desire and longing, with superb performances and direction.
Theatrical Release:Jul 7, 2006 Limited
Box Office: $472,683
Synopsis: Laurent Cantet's feature film stars Charlotte Rampling and is set in 1970s Haiti. The film examines a time and place in which wealthy women from the east headed to the country in search of sexual... Laurent Cantet's feature film stars Charlotte Rampling and is set in 1970s Haiti. The film examines a time and place in which wealthy women from the east headed to the country in search of sexual fulfillment among its young male population. [More]
Starring: Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, Louise Portal
Starring: Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, Louise Portal
Director: Laurent Cantet
Director: Laurent Cantet
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Reviews for Heading South
The regal Rampling has never been finer, and Cesar makes his character surprisingly proud and sympathetic.
The film offers something unusual, a tragic spectacle of normal, recognizable and utterly sympathetic people condemning themselves.
The movie avoids devolving into polemic by treating its characters as individuals.
In its way, the film is a piercing indictment, though it makes its point without much screaming, hectoring or preening. It's quietly terrific.
At 60, with three 2006 releases in the can, Rampling still seems an international treasure, a great camera subject and a truly daring actress.
Boasts another formidable and fine-tuned performance from the great Charlotte Rampling.
A nervy but muddleheaded work ... with sharply unpleasant things to say about the First World's moral strip-mining of the Third but an overly tactful way of saying them.
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 film is too slow for my taste, but for perfectly formed characters and authentic human conflict, Heading South is beautifully written, carefully photographed and eventually devastating.
What is surprising is the delicacy with which Rampling and Cantet -- himself better known as a chronicler of men -- create a character of such potent feminine hunger.
Heading South is a seemingly straightforward and simple picture that's really defiantly complex, sexually, politically and emotionally.
In Laurent Cantet's fine new film Heading South, the amorous travelers aren't men but well-heeled, middle-aged women from North America, and their playground is lawless Haiti.
A powerful cocktail of not just sex and love but race, poverty, colonialism and jealousy.
A well-acted but misguided tale of displaced sexual longing on the beaches of Baby Doc Duvalier's 1970s Haiti.
Laurent Cantet's devastating new film contemplates the darker social undercurrents beneath a seemingly benign example of sexual tourism. examination of middle-age desire.
An intelligent movie, not so much salacious as affecting but ultimately less analytical than overwrought...
Albert's bitterness deserved further development, but the real puzzle is why Cantet doesn't let Legba have a say.
Cantet never finds the keys to his characters in Heading South and fails to give them life beyond the politicized representations imposed on them by Laferrière.
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July 06, 2006:
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