One of the finest films I’ve seen recently is The Return, starring Ralph Fiennes as the Ancient Greek hero, Odysseus, and Juliette Binoche as his wife, Penelope. It’s the story of Homer’s Odyssey from the moment Odysseus finally washes up on the shore of Ithaca after ten years of war against the Trojans and ten years of bother and palaver as he tried to find his way home. Not one of the brave men he took with him to the war has survived so it’s assumed that Odysseus is at the bottom of the sea too. Or shacked up with a gorgeous ‘love goddess’ on an island somewhere. So, his home is besieged by ‘suitors’, each one hoping to step up and marry Odysseus’s wife, thereby helping himself to the marital bed, home and kingdom.

This is one of the original hero/warrior stories, handled exquisitely.The casting in The Return could not be better, not least in Charlie Plummer as Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, who was a baby when his father left for war and now, around 20, doesn’t know whether to save his mother or loathe her, or to head off on his own quest to locate his father. The beauty of this story is how it balances the pain of all three characters and this film captures that faithfully. There’s also the ancient pleasure, if you know The Odyssey at all, of seeing a familiar story beautifully retold.

I have some small quibbles. One is that, as usual these days, the gods are left out. I particularly miss Athena, Odysseus’s goddess-champion, who flirts and banters with him, and crucially appears with the deft touch of a Fairy Godmother to disguise him either as a beggar or as his muscly, gorgeous younger self. With her merry sense of eternity, that ultimately all human life is a game, she lifts the tone of the whole thing out of sepia tragedy every time she appears.

My second thought is that in Homer’s original, Odysseus’s father Laertes lives to reunite with his son Odysseus and grandson Telemachus. In the film his death is hurried to force Penelope into an early decision about who is to replace Odysseus. Can we ever improve on Homer? Turns out that yes, we can. This is the right move in this film.

Third, and another stroke of brilliance, is that after Odysseus has cleared the place of the appalling ‘suitors’, and has a long-needed bath, he is bathed by Penelope herself, not servants. This supremely gentle scene is exactly what the exhausted old soldier needs and finishes the film beautifully.

My earlier posts (about how Homer, all those years ago, broke both the Quest hero mould and the love story template while setting the standard for thousands of years) have been milled and honed into my new book scheduled to be published in 2027 by trad publisher Colorful Crow in the USA. Meanwhile you have The Return to enjoy. It is excellent and has joined the pile of my favourite films.

For an excellent translation in readable English of this part of The Odyssey, there’s Enitharmon’s The Bending of the Bow by Neil Curry. For the full length Odyssey, Emily Wilson’s version is superb, as is poet Simon Armitage’s. (It’s Armitage, incidentally, who addresses Odysseus’s relationship with Calypso with unmatched clarity and describes him as her sex-slave.) And Nicolson’s The Mighty Dead is still an important, really enjoyable read around anything to do with Homer.

Happy writing!