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Movie on Homer’s Odyssey Starring Ralph Fiennes Shot in Greece

Movie Homer Odyssey
Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes star in an epic based on The Odyssey. Credit: Elena Ternovaja, CC BY-SA 3.0 and Dick Thomas Johnson, CC BY 2.0/Wikipedia

An epic movie based on Homer’s ancient Greek classic, ‘The Odyssey’ is in a post-production phase after it wrapped up filming on the Ionian island of Corfu in the spring.

Starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as his beloved wife Penelope, production of  ‘The Return’ started 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’.

Movie Odyssey
The ‘Return” will be released in American theaters in 2024. Credit: Bleecker Street

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.

Odyssey according to Homer

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.

Odysseus’s return to his island, however, is not the end of his woes. He finds that 108 young men from the local vicinity have invaded his home to put pressure on his wife Penelope to marry one of them. A stalemate exists, and it is only resolved by an archery contest at the end of the poem, which then leads to the slaughter of all the suitors by Odysseus and his son, Telemachus.

Peace on the island is eventually restored through the intervention of Athena, goddess of wisdom, victory, and war.

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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