An epic movie based on Homer’s ancient Greek classic, ‘The Odyssey’ will be partly shot in Greece.
Starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as his beloved wife Penelope, production of ‘The Return’ is expected to start in Greece this spring in Corfu and the Peloponnese, before continuing in Italy, Variety reports.
Fiennes and Binoche are reuniting for the epic twenty-five years after ‘The English Patient’.
Bleecker Street, which has picked up the rights to the film, will release it in theatres in 2024.
Variety says that the film is an Italy-Greece-UK-France co-production. Directed by Academy Award nominee Uberto Pasolini, ‘The Return’ will also star Venice Film Festival Best Young Actor Award winner Charlie Plummer.
Synopsis of the movie based on Homer’s Odyssey
Here’s an official synopsis for the film, shared by Variety: After 20 years away, Odysseus (Fiennes) washes up on the shores of Ithaca, haggard and unrecognizable. The King has finally returned home but much has changed in his kingdom since he left to fight in the Trojan war.
His beloved wife Penelope (Binoche) is now a prisoner in her own home, hounded by her many ambitious suitors to choose a new husband, a new king.
Their son Telemachus (Plummer), who has grown up fatherless, is facing death at the hands of the suitors who see him as an obstacle in their relentless pursuit of Penelope and the kingdom. Odysseus has changed too.
Scarred by his experience of war, he is no longer the mighty warrior his people remember. But he is forced to face his past in order to rediscover the strength needed to save his family and win back the love he has lost.
The Odyssey, like the Iliad, is divided into 24 books, corresponding to the 24 letters in the Greek alphabet.
Within the middle section of the poem (Books 9-12), Odysseus describes all the challenges that he has faced trying to get home. These include monsters of various sorts, a visit to the afterlife, cannibals, drugs, alluring women, and the hostility of Poseidon himself. These challenges resemble those of earlier heroes like Heracles and Jason.
In the Iliad, the hero Achilles faces no such challenges, indicating that The Odyssey has a very different idea of heroism.
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