Like Time Out’s stoney-faced spectre, the three colonial lionesses that prowl Laurent Cantet’s Heading South just wanna play hooky, though they’ve replaced the psychopathology of the former with a more modest aim: to lie in the sun and get laid. The burnished savannah of Haiti is their home-away-from-home (circa the “late 70s,” as an early title card notes), and stumbling out of the fogged hive of corporate lounges and car interiors that ruled Cantet’s first film, the opening here is almost enough to make you choke on your spritzer: On a beach scene cut from diamond, two lithe young black boys entertain Charlotte Rampling’s aging Ellen, the three of them trading coy seductions like gifts between cultures. And while that may not sound like much on paper, unlike Malick, who uses history as a throughline to naive transcendance, Cantent deals out anachronisms with spiked discord.

Nestling in her plume of entitlement, Ellen is every bit an adjunct of Babar-ian fantasy; with dramatic calm, she lies in wait, delicately plucking the fruits of this land straight from the vine. For the women there, Haiti is a playground nursed by one constant: As long as they keep paying up, they’re open to endless indulgence away from the throat-sore bar scene of their home lives. But paradise is thrown into tremors with the entrance of Brenda (Karen Young), a puppyfaced American who perverts the adage of free paid-for love by trying to leash the untameable Legba, the gem of Ellen’s existence. Inadvertantly, Legba becomes the feeding ground for two competing discourses: In an act of reclamation, Brenda tries to usher him into the new world, adorning him with gifts like hung christmas lights; meanwhile, Ellen, who scoffs “you look like a black guy from Harlem” after seeing him out with her, would rather preserve him in honeydew. As a survey of global relations, the film is weak, lazily trying to recuperate multiple stances by having characters every so often take time out to deliver a monologue into the cameraface, Survivor-style (though, the absence of one from Legba means he never advances beyond being a fetish-object - strung-up in his own halved loyalties). Nevertheless, ethical tie-ups are superceded by the fact that this is a film of surface effect, based on the pure spectacle of characters trying to inhabit old skins as best and as gaudily as they can. Only as soon as it shades over into emotional realism – imbuing these costumes with a register that’s beyond them – does Cantet sacrifice our interest. Just don’t be surprised when he’s kidnapped to direct the next Nike commerical.—David Levinson