"Heading South"

We learn more about these characters -- and something about Albert (Lys Ambrose), the Haitian gentleman who officially does run the joint -- from the straight-to-camera monologues they deliver. (Legba is the only major character who doesn't deliver such a monologue, and not, I don't think, because Cantet doesn't think he's important, but because Legba is the true center of the movie: He's a receptacle for hopes and desires that he has no way of fulfilling. The women claim to love him, but part of what they're in love with is a dream -- an illusion that Cantet fully acknowledges, although he refuses to punish them for it.)

Monologues like these are tricky for any director to pull off, and the first one, Brenda's, feels stiff and awkward at first. But as she tells her story, you realize that ungainliness is intentional: Brenda describes how she first met Legba. He was very thin, and very hungry, and she and her husband magnanimously bought him dinner: She marvels, with affection that she doesn't realize is tinged with condescension, that she had never seen anyone eat so much in her life. Then Brenda goes on to explain, in halting sentences that give way to tumbling, explicit ones, how she made love with Legba for the first time: She had her first orgasm at age 45.

And yet that revelation is almost incidental, because although "Heading South" is defiantly open about the sexual desires of "older" women -- the quotation marks are there because most of us have no idea of what "older" means, although somehow we know it when we see it -- the picture is decidedly not a fantasy about woman's sexual self-fulfillment. "Heading South" is just as interested in how these women's lives intersect with, and affect, the lives of the boys they come to sleep with: When Legba goes into town to play ball with his friends, they all admire him, asking him for advice on how to score with the ladies; when he visits his mother, who hasn't seen him for two weeks, she illuminates the small shack she lives in not by flipping a switch, but by plugging a light fixture directly into the wall. The movie never lets us forget what status and money mean to this kid. It also never lets us forget the very real dangers of life under the Baby Doc Duvalier regime, dangers that the white women who lavish him with gifts and money never have to face. (The movie doesn't feature any literal depictions of Duvalier's barbaric "security force," the Tonton Macoutes, but its glowering, watchful eye is ever-present.)

"Heading South" is a seemingly straightforward and simple picture that's really defiantly complex, sexually, politically and emotionally. Even the look of the picture has many muted layers: It's been beautifully shot by Pierre Milon, whose lens drinks in gorgeous beach vistas and breeze-ruffled foliage. Yet somehow we're always aware of the poverty, and the danger, just beyond the margins of the screen: This isn't a travelogue brochure.

The performances are similarly multilayered, often demanding that we reconcile conflicting views of each character. Louise Portal plays Sue, a plump woman from Montreal who's the most emotionally grounded of the tourists: She comes every year to spend time with her young lover, Neptune, and the changes the place effects on her become plain when she explains in her monologue, almost shyly, "It doesn't show, but here I feel like a butterfly."

Rampling, with her alternately bewitching and withering gaze, stresses Ellen's aggravating qualities -- yet her self-deprecating sense of humor often throws us a curve, and there are moments where her hard shell breaks apart before our eyes.

But Karen Young, perhaps best known for guest stints on "The Sopranos" and "Law & Order," is the true star of "Heading South." Critics and pundits are always complaining about how few good roles there are for "older" (there are those quotation marks again) actresses. What Young has here is one of those elusive good roles, although I wonder how much attention it will get, seeing that Brenda isn't a role model or a victim we can cheer for, but a human being who's privileged in some ways and deprived in others. Here, Young plays a character who's around the same age as the actress is in real life: This isn't 30 trying to pass for 20.

Young brings to the role a delicate blend of tentativeness and fierceness: At the beginning, we have no idea how emotionally fragile she is, and like Ellen, she teases out feelings of aggravation in us. But by the movie's end, we see both how wrongheaded she was to come to Haiti, and how there's no other place in the world for her. Brenda may think she has come to Haiti, to Legba, for fulfillment, which she's willing and able to pay for. Her painful discovery is that love and fulfillment aren't the same thing. "Heading South" is only partly about the power that money confers; mostly, it's about everything that money can't buy.

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