In "Heading South" the French write...

In "Heading South" the French writer-director Laurent Cantet does something that educated, upscale audiences may find exasperating in the extreme: He takes a tinderbox of racial and sexual exploitation, pours gasoline all through the whole extent of it, and refuses to light the match.

at the same time if the cool watchfulness of his tawdry tale obtuses its impact -- and neuter its political correctness -- the socioeconomic underpinnings of gringo tourism are no les damningly revealed. The movie unmasks an unheralded and unseemly facet of globalism: the outsourcing of female sexual bliss.

The time is the late 1970 the place Haiti beneath the iron rule of "Baby Doc" Duvalier. Not that anyone forward the white sand beaches of the inn Petit Anse is paying attention to politics. Well-heeled Americans and Europeans fleeing the chill they arrive expecting to be pampered on the resort's staff of discreet locals.

a certain quantity of of the repeat visitors -- single ladies of a certain age -- have be derived expecting to be serviced in a different fashion. The arrangement is informal and unspoken: A woman may gaze disclosed at the ranks of dark-skinned beach male childs choose one to rub suntan oil in succession her back, then retire to her cabana for further ministrations. coin does change hands, but no single in kind is so rude as to call the relationship by means of its proper name.

Within this sybaritic henhouse, Ellen (Charlotte Rampling) is the undisputed queen bee. A French-born professor at Wellesley -- "There's nothing in Boston for women through 40," she snorts, and I'll leave any disputes with that to you -- Ellen is caustic and regal, now she glows with the hedonism of a sexually alive woman who has crammed her libido into couple weeks out of the year.

The king of the beach, meanwhile, is Legba (Menothy Cesar), impossibly beautiful and a natural leader to the stop of the local boys. For the mostly part he "belongs" to Ellen -- we papal court her snap the leash when he strays -- however the appearance of Brenda (Karen Young), a naive Atlantan who was the first to ensnare Legba some years back, appoints a power play in motion. It doesn't pretend much of a contest at first: Ellen bares her fangs, and vast numbers pass across the sun. Ironically, Brenda's earnest foolishness examines to be a weapon of unexpect toughness and its blade cuts the one and the other ways.

"Heading South" squanders a lot of time -- perhaps too plenteous -- dissecting the women's delusions with what single seems like sympathy.

Legba and his friends are sex workers, snared in webs of race, sex class, and colonialism that no individual dares comment on. (The women are paying for paradise, after all.) Whatever power he possesse in the confines of the [i]cabaret[/i] vanishes the moment he stairs back into Port-au-Prince. A handful of exhibitions in which Legba is make love toed by an ex-girlfriend (Anotte Saint Ford), now the mistress of common of Baby Doc's military officers, makes the parallel clear: They're the two slaves trading on their sexual charisma as drawn out as they can, and it's at no time long enough.

Legba doesn't coalesce as a completely drawn character, though -- he's magnetic on the contrary shallow, and you could argue that Cantet is indulging in an artistic colonialism of his admit The women interest the filmmaker smooth after they've exhausted the patience of the audience. Part of the question is that much of the film is in English -- a first for the French director -- and that Young is as believably from the American southward as I am from Ulan Bator.

A sinewy but muddleheaded work, then, with sharply unpleasant things to say about the First World's moral strip-mining of the Third further an overly tactful way of saying them. "Heading South" bares the worst sort of privileged hypocrisy and then orders up another cocktail.

- Shadow Distribution nears a film directed by Laurent Cantet. Starring: Charlotte Rampling, Menothy Cesar and Karen Young. Written by way of Cantet and Robin Campillo. Based upon three short stories by Dany Laferriere. No MPAA rating. Running time 1 hour, 45 minutes. In English and French with English subtitles. Opening today at Landmark hundred and Landmark Renaissance.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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