Heading South (Vers le sud), directed by Laurent Cantet, takes place in Haiti (the actual filming is in both the Dominican Republic and Haiti) during the late 1970s at a beach resort where the principal guests are frustrated single White women, who want pure sex with gentle and passionate young Black men, whose poverty drives them to service them. Most of the focus is on 48-year-old Brenda (played by Karen Young), who arrives later than the rest and quickly falls in love with skinny teenage Legba (played by Ménothy Cesar); she experienced her first orgasm with him three years earlier and is now desperately in love with him. But Ellen (played by Charlotte Rampling), a 55-year-old Wellesley professor, scolds Brenda for falling in love, as everyone else is there for sex and not for emotional melodrama, though she wants him for herself. One day, however, Legba is pursued by an older Black man. He flees from the resort, returns to his mother to give her all the money that he has been paid, visits a Black girlfriend, and his dead body is found the following morning along with another young Black boy. Filmviewers may conclude that the Black girlfriend was off limits, perhaps the daughter of someone important in Haiti who does not want a bisexual stud to complicate his political or social life. The White women, meanwhile, are thereby warned that they may be playing with fire by treating the young Haitians as callboys. Brenda decides to return to to the United States, shattered by the experience, but unconcerned along with the rest of the women that they are shattering the lives of their courtesans by enriching them, as the resort’s waiter, Albert (played by Lys Ambroise), whose father fought the Americans during the occupation in 1915, well knows. MH
I
want to comment on this film
