A free-trade agreement of sex and respect

THE well-worn truism that you can’t leave yourself behind wherever you go has an equally valid counterpart -- that travel can sometimes help you uncover a hidden, truer version of yourself. It certainly appears to work that way for the American protagonists of “Heading South (Vers le Sud),” a pointed new French film that pursues the ramifications of Western discontent and middle-aged female desire against the backdrop of 1970s Haiti.

A pack of affluent, loveless North American women journeys to a pristine beachside resort each year to bask in the affections of local young men. The men in turn embrace the intruders: In the transaction they gain not just the means to survive, but possibly the only measure of dignity afforded in a society that tramples over its citizens.

Director and co-screenwriter Laurent Cantet adapted the narrative from a collection of short stories by Haitian-born author Dany Laferriere. Though the book is set a quarter of a century ago, during the dictatorship of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, “I had the feeling that I could have written it,” Cantet said. “It reminded me of being in Port-au-Prince, where anything can happen at any time. When you go out in the street, you could get killed before you reach the corner -- or you could meet someone and spend the whole day talking about life. The book also brought me back to what I’m always trying to do when I’m writing a script or filming a film -- to mix very political issues with very intimate issues.”

“Heading South,” which opens Friday in L.A., is the third feature film from Cantet, who is 46 and celebrated in France for a kind of cinematic realism veined with subtlety and restraint. His previous two films investigated the idea of work as a source of economic and spiritual sustenance. In “Time Out (L’emploi du Temps)” (2001), a business consultant who cannot bring himself to acknowledge to friends and family that he has been let go, weaves a web of deceit to maintain the charade of employment. His first full-length picture, “Human Resources (Ressources Humaines)” (1999), also dealt with redundancy: Welders in a small French town see their jobs threatened by the proposed shrinking of the work week to 35 hours -- a hot-button issue in France at the time.

That Cantet was able to illuminate his characters’ struggles with tenderness -- and without judgment -- was an achievement that persuaded Charlotte Rampling to sign on as one of his leading ladies in “Heading South.” “Knowing Laurent from his work, I felt that in his hands, this very sensitive subject could be very beautifully portrayed,” the 60-year-old actress said from her Paris home. “It’s something that hasn’t been really spoken about -- women doing this particular kind of thing, and going about it in almost a man’s way.”

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‘On the edge’

DRAWN to characters “in difficulty” and filled with “hopes and failures,” Rampling took delight in the part of Ellen, a regal, seemingly cynical French lit professor at Wellesley College who professes to have no romantic illusions about her Haitian lovers. Reviewers have been extolling her courageous, nuanced performance, one in a string of unflinching portrayals of mature sexuality. “When you’re in films that need an effort from the spectator because they tackle difficult subjects, you can’t expect necessarily to always hit the right mark” she said of her portrayal. Anyway, she added, “I like to be a little bit more on the edge than Hollywood is.” She calls her recent collaborations with French film directors such as Francois Ozon and Cantet “the kind of work I really privilege.”

Cantet, who was born in Melle, a small town near Poitiers, and graduated from France’s prestigious Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques, spent the first 15 years of his career working in television, co-directing, among other things, war documentaries in Sarajevo and Beirut. His cinematic output can be seen as a hybrid between the politically engaged French films of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and the poetic, contemplative cinema that succeeded it. The director believes that the last two decades have marked a return to realism of sorts in French-language cinema -- and he acknowledges that he’s part of a continuum that also includes the Dardenne brothers, Erick Zonca and Bruno Dumont.

“When I made ‘Human Resources’ -- which was one of the first films that talked about working conditions -- I was told it was very lucky that it was produced for TV, because nobody would ever pay to see such a movie in theaters,” the soft-spoken Cantet said back in April, during an L.A. trip to promote an advance screening of his latest film. “Nowadays, I think producers and distributors realize that this kind of film attracts people more than we can imagine.”

Like the factory workers of “Human Resources” and the unemployed salary man of “Time Out,” the women in “Heading South” are complicated -- perfectly capable of sensual enjoyment even as they struggle against existential malaise. But as their stories unfold, they seem to gain the capacity to evaluate themselves and their actions with honesty and change in ways that audiences tend to acknowledge with a frisson of recognition.

Though Cantet counts Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli among his sources of inspiration, it is the neorealist director Roberto Rossellini whom he singles out as his spiritual “grandfather”; like Rossellini, he seeks to attack social issues at their humanistic heart. “He’s very into making films that feel very, very, very real,” Rampling said. “Films that are not ostensibly out to entertain you, but to make you feel that you are seeing a form of reality through a story.”

The topic of sex tourism gained particular currency in Cantet’s homeland in 2003 with the publication of “Platform,” a novel by France’s literary enfant terrible, Michel Houellebecq. The book depicted the practice as something brutal and ugly -- a symptom of the ongoing corruption of Third World countries by an affluent, diseased West. As Cantet sees it, “Heading South” deals with a less clear-cut issue. He even coined a term -- “love tourism” -- to explain his take and that of co-screenwriter Robin Campillo on this kind of post-colonial realignment between the haves and the have-nots. “I wanted to show two kinds of misery at work: the social misery of the Haitians and the sensual or sexual misery of the American women. To me, those two miseries don’t exploit each other; they help each other to go on living.”

In other words, moviegoers who expect a forceful denunciation of the flesh trade may be disappointed -- as will those who expect something along the lines of proverbial Stellas getting their groove back. Cantet says that maintaining a sense of detached empathy was imperative, and in keeping with author Laferriere’s plea to him -- “to not make a film about predators and victims.”

“It’s a European film that deals with Americans, I feel, in a compassionate but cold way,” said Karen Young, a New Jersey-born actress mostly known stateside for a recurring role as an FBI agent on “The Sopranos,” who plays Brenda, Rampling’s co-lead. “It’s a good change of pace for an American audience.”

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Adventures in filmmaking

CANTET insisted on injecting cinema verite urgency into his project by filming on location, although the planned shooting schedule overlapped with the 2004 overthrow of Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide, forcing the cast and crew to retreat to locations in the neighboring Dominican Republic. There was a one-year delay, and the film was finally completed last spring for a budget of roughly $4 million.

Leading a supporting cast of almost exclusively nonprofessional actors was Menothy Cesar, an 18-year-old Haitian youth Cantet handpicked from a pool of 200 candidates. His first outing in front of the camera won him the Marcello Mastroianni prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival. “It’s not possible to control everything when you work with nonprofessional actors,” the filmmaker said. “It’s not danger like being in Port-au-Prince, but it’s another kind of instability, which is important for me.” (The film has yet to be shown in Haiti, and the political climate has rendered it unsafe for Cesar to stay behind; he’s recently moved to Paris.)

Cantet is at work on a script woven from reportage he did last November on the streets of New Orleans, documenting the post-Hurricane Katrina devastation. He plans to return soon and look for locals he can cast to play themselves. The sense of traveling, of fumbling for a figurative or literal home -- figures in his next story too.

“All my films are about people trying to find a place in the world,” he said. “And if they don’t find it, they pretend that they have.”