A powerful cocktail of not just sex and love but race, poverty, colonialism and jealousy.
Comment
07/07/06
Heading South (2006)
69
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:81
Fresh:56
Rotten:25
Average Rating:6.7/10
Consensus: As touching as it is disturbing, Heading South is an unconventional exploration of desire and longing, with superb performances and direction.
Theatrical Release:07-07-2006
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... [More]
Reviews for Heading South
A well-acted but misguided tale of displaced sexual longing on the beaches of Baby Doc Duvalier's 1970s Haiti.
07/07/06
Looking for love in all the wrong places cools in the warmth of the Haitian sun.
07/06/06
Issues of class and race are overwhelmed by the third act melodrama.
07/06/06
The new film by Laurent Cantet (Human Resources and the masterpiece Time Out) is evocative and disturbing.
07/06/06
Laurent Cantet's devastating new film contemplates the darker social undercurrents beneath a seemingly benign example of sexual tourism. examination of middle-age desire.
07/06/06
Top CriticWhile the film's focus is hazy and the dialogue sometimes clunky, it's still worth seeing . . . a melancholy reminder of the myopia in which privileged, self-absorbed whites can wrap themselves while travelling abroad.
07/06/06
But though the women talk a lot about the soul-changing effects of great sex, Cantet largely steers clear of cinematic sensuality, making his heroines' satisfaction -- and the way it exploits the poor -- primarily theoretical.
07/06/06
An intelligent movie, not so much salacious as affecting but ultimately less analytical than overwrought...
07/05/06
It's nice that they're finally adapting Harlequin romance novels into movies.
07/04/06
Heading South represents a very different direction for [director] Cantet from his previous film [Time Out] and the result is satisfying in its own way.
07/02/06
A superb drama.
07/02/06
Rampling and Young give all kinds of subtle shadings to their performances and their dual scenes of leaving the island, one broken-hearted and accompanied by 'old' Haiti, the other finding a new, horrific exhilaration, deliver a final, resounding punch.
07/02/06
Director/co-writer Laurent Cantet's Heading South/Vers le sud is uniquely serious and for once from the girls' side of things.
07/01/06
Spinster women are not a very effective symbol of racism and colonialism in Haiti, are they? A better film would have targeted the U.S. Marines.
06/29/06
In the end, the pretense of romance is what you walk away with. It might have made a memorable study of dark needs if it didn't wear down its vitality with so much dispiriting weakness.
06/21/06
Preoccupied with people's longing for unattainable mastery over forces beyond their control and the facades they assume as a means of compensating for their powerlessness.
06/12/06
A movie about middle-aged women frolicking with smooth-skinned Haitian locals on the beach can be either erotic and sensual, or exploitive and pointless.
02/12/06
Albert's bitterness deserved further development, but the real puzzle is why Cantet doesn't let Legba have a say.
02/03/06
Top CriticCantet 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.
02/03/06
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