Heading South

Heading South opens up a fascinating world of complexities, some of which are there on the screen although others open up only once the horizon line moves past the screen's edge.

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.

The film offers something unusual, a tragic spectacle of normal, recognizable and utterly sympathetic people condemning themselves.

An unsettling drama by the director of two other remarkable films about class illusions, Human Resources and Time Out.

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.

The denunciation material presented by this Cantet film makes me reflect when it elaborates a very contained and transparent panorama on misery, social inequality and sex tourism. [Full review in Spanish]

Displays an almost Fassbinder-like sensitivity to emotional shifts in power

A trio of middle-aged white women from different backgrounds relish the tropical pleasures of '70s era Haiti, which includes local teenage gigolos, in writer/director Laurent Cantet's problematic filmic adaptation of three short stories by Dany Laferriere