Heading South (2006)

I love this movie so much

The Worst Film Ever

Overrated

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

At the center of "Vers le sud" (Going South) is Legba, a hunky and lovable teenage Haitian lad who works as a sort of beach boy at a posh Haitian resort well away from the miseries of Haiti's urban areas in the 1970s.What Legba really does is provide "companionship" to middle aged American and European single women who want attention paid to them in an exotic locale with well-muscled and charming young black menwith French accents. It's kinda sex tourism, but for the gals.Legba (Methony Cesar) has long been the special summer companion to Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), about 55, a resort regular who is a Brit and a languages professor from Boston. She is worldly, sophisticated and imperious. She considers Legba basically hers for the summer.Into this scenario bumbles Brenda (Karen Young), a mouseburger divorcée from Savannah, Ga., who visited the hotel once three years earlier and had a sexual liaison with Legba. At age 45, she had her first orgasm with him. She is obsessed with him and, once she finds he's still working at the hotel, intends to claim him as hers.Brenda is clearly not emotionally stable, but Ellen also has issues.You may think this movie is going to be some kind of cat fight, but it has bigger fish to fry. For one thing, Legba, we see, has a back story no one else in the movie is aware of. The movie explores racism, colonialism, women's issues and class conflict, among other things. Hey, it's a French movie.If you like well-crafted, original dramas, you should check it out.

Three middle-aged women that have boring lives travel to the Hotel Petite Anse, in Port Prince, Haiti, to have good-time with sex and beach. Brenda (Karen Young), from Savannah, Georgia, has left her husband and returned to the hotel seeking out the local gigolo Legba (Ménothy Cesar), a young man with a sculptural body that gave her first orgasm three years ago. However, she finds that Legba is "dating" the lonely Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), a literature teacher from Boston. Ellen introduces the frustrated Canadian Sue (Louise Portal) that works in Montreal in the storage department of a factory to Brenda, and disputes with the new acquaintance the sexual favors of Legba. However, the youngster has a serious problem and is hunted by a violent man.The deceptive "Vers le Sud" is a boring and overrated soap-opera that goes nowhere. Despite the theme, the director does not dare and makes a conventional movie with no eroticism or sexual tension among the characters that are shallow and uninteresting. Charlotte Rampling is still a beautiful woman but the scene where she mentions that she is fifty-five years old is absolutely unnecessary since she was almost sixty in 2005. My vote is three.Title (Brazil) "Em Direção ao Sul" ("In the Direction of South")

French writer-director Laurent Cantet creates films in which an intimate drama of well etched characters plays out within a broader subtext, a backdrop that focuses on some larger social issue. Heading South is about unattached white women of sufficient means to enjoy Caribbean vacations and indulge their sexual appetites with local men. This story is set against the misery of an impoverished underclass in early 1970s Port-au-Prince, Haiti.Charlotte Rampling plays Ellen, a college English teacher in Boston who's been coming to a particular beachfront hotel for years. She spends all summer. Unsentimental, lusty and outspoken, she pays for the attentions of Legba (Ménothy César) a lovely young lad of 18 who can make Ellen come when she merely thinks about him. She has no illusions about this arrangement, or so it seems for a while. She knows that Legba services many tourists like her, makes his living this way, probably supports his family as well. She's the ringleader of a circle of women, each with a favorite local gigolo in tow.Upsetting this idyllic arrangement, Brenda (Karen Young) arrives on the scene. She's the antithesis of Ellen, a mopey, sad sack of a woman, 10 years Ellen's junior but with none of the older woman's appeal. Brenda's a terminal romantic and entirely self-centered. She had in fact seduced Legba three years earlier, when he was 15, has thought of him daily since then, and, following a divorce, is now returning to find and take up with him again. She's in love.Brenda boldly lays claim to Legba, who tries to service her on the side while still maintaining his connection to Ellen. No way. Initially amused by Brenda's earnestness, Ellen gradually reveals that she is not as tough as she would have people believe. She is deeply hurt and angry in fact when Legba rejects her to spend more time exclusively with Brenda.Legba is playing his own game. He's not in love with Brenda. But she is giving him plenty of gifts. If anything, he toys with her sober infatuation, perhaps finds it a refreshing change of pace from Ellen's frankness and mock insults. But Brenda isn't playing by the rules. This throws everybody off and ratchets up tensions.We begin to see into Legba's his town life, where the picture is far from rosy. A destitute mother. An old girlfriend who has become the mistress of a wealthy gangster but begs for Legba's company. We see him interrupt a street soccer match to rescue his young sidekick Eddy from possible arrest or worse by a cop who drinks a pop from the boy's sidewalk stand without paying, and kicks over the stand when Eddy protests.Ellen learns that Legba is in trouble, hunted by a gunman who works for the gangster. She begs him to let her help, to protect him, even to go to Boston with her to live, but he won't hear of it. We can see that she cares for his welfare in a genuine sense. But the gulf between them, which Ellen had lulled herself into ignoring, is ever present to Legma.We receive a fuller, more insightful picture of Haitian sensibilities toward whites from Albert (Lys Ambroise), the chief factotum of management at the hotel. We get Albert's take through a long aside, a soliloquy spoken into the camera, directly to us. Ellen, Brenda and Sue take their turns giving us information on their backgrounds and sentiments in using the same dramatic device. Always a perilous film tactic, it works well here. Albert's contempt for the white overclass runs deep, a passion that had been passed down from his grandparents.He speaks of the power of American money over the poor local population. Where the French stole their independence, and the Duvaliers stole their worldly goods, the Americans are stealing their dignity, and right under Albert's nose. As he sees it, the young native men hustling tourist women, trading sex for money and baubles, are degrading themselves, but feel forced to do so to make a living.For his part, Legba is also deeply sensitive to these circumstances. He has little trouble recognizing Brenda as his original seducer, and is enraged when he sees her dirty dancing with young Eddy on the beach. It isn't at all clear that any of the women, not Brenda, not even Ellen, can fathom the broader context and harsher ironies underlying their connections with their boyfriends. Ellen says she has no interest in going into town, that it's a bore. We can surmise that Legba would much prefer to live his life among his own people and no longer prostitute himself. Ellen's notion of how best to help him is, for all her seeming savvy, naive.We can hope that the screenplay is authentic, for it is based on three short stories by the native Haitian novelist Dany Laferrière, who was born in 1953 in Port-au-Prince. He was a late teenager himself in the years when this script is set. He abruptly left Haiti in 1976, fearing for his life, and has lived in Montreal since (spending some time in Miami as well).Cantet never insults the viewer's intelligence by dispensing sociologic wisdom or overreaching with his chosen conceits. The characters play out their lives on vividly realistic terms. By the end some people have died, and the principal women have exchanged psychological places. Ellen, now bereft and vulnerable, goes home to Boston and, presumably, a life of embitterment. In the final scene we see a refreshed Brenda, journeying off to tour more islands, bound for new adventures, now acting the sexual predator, but dragging her wrecking ball behind her. Filmed on location in Haiti. (In French & English) My grades: 8.5/10 (A-) (Seen on 09/21/06)

I saw this movie on August 19, 2006. It took me some time to catch on and find a meaning to it, but I did. The ladies in the movie were all obviously past age 40. It was clear that each one of them was tired of the bar scene and hadn't been in a relationship for a period of time. They felt that going to Haiti was an escape from the reality of where they were living, their jobs, and the fact that each of them wasn't in a relationship. The Hatian young men were used to provide them with a man to be with. Ellen admitted to the fact that life for a woman after 40 is different and the bars held nothing for her. Possibly the same can be said for the other women in the movie who were on Haiti for a vacation. What these women failed to realize and possibly didn't want to realize is the fact that there are other alternatives to finding men other than a bar, such as volunteering and hobby and special interest clubs. The same can be said for other women and I am sure for men. Ellen and Brenda had an interest in the same young Hatian man. When he was killed, they had no more purpose to being in Haiti. The movie does show the poverty in Haiti at the time, which still exists.