Heading South (2005)

Heading South (2005) caught my eye because resting dead face actor Charlotte Rampling was on the cover, and I will watch anything she's in. What's it about, apart from what its cover suggests? (Charlotte looking over her shoulder, grinning, a naked black man beside her, his back turned, the back of another woman walking away from them on the white sands of a palm-bordered beach.)

A Winter Tan (1987) came to mind, a film based on a diary-in-letters by Maryse Holder, a New York editor who took "vacations from feminism" to explore herself through her sexuality in Mexico (Heading South takes place in Haiti; both films are set in the 1970s). But Charlotte's "Ellen" is more established, more together than Jackie Burroughs's "Holder", and as the film makes clear, Ellen, a university professor from Boston who has been vacationing at this Haitian town for the past six years, knows exactly who she is and what she wants. "I'm crazy about love. Sex and love. I'm not really sure anymore," she tells the newly-arrived Brenda, a recent divorcee from Savannah, Georgia, and maybe a younger, if less together, if less uptight version of Ellen.

Brenda is played by Karen Young, a seasoned actor who I had never seen or heard of before but seemed familiar to me. While Rampling's character has two gears, Brenda's was likely designed to provide three variations of low -- as in key. But she gives more than that, and I was very taken with her performance.

The third character is Legba (played by Ménothy César), the Black man whose back is on the cover. "Legba belongs to everyone," says Ellen, and Brenda finds herself among them. She also experiences first hand that someone is trying to kill Legba (for a past relationship with a local who has taken up with a Duvalier crony) but, like the rest of the white women visitors, she never learns why. Ellen thinks her actions had something to do with Legba's murder, while Brenda, somewhat shockingly, has already moved on to the next adventure.

Heading South's original title is Vers le sud and is based on three short stories from La Chair du Maître (1997) by Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière.