This is a film by Laurent Cantet who directed the superb ‘Time Out’ and the not bad ‘Human Resources’, both films about the alienation of work and the struggles and personal demons that follow. ‘Heading South’, by contrast is about sex tourism. Set in the late 1970s in Haiti, the film depicts a group of middle-aged white women who stay at a small hotel in Haiti in order to surround themselves and have sex with young Haitian men. In fact they are little more than boys. There is a mock documentary style as every so often, one of the lead characters speaks straight to the camera and tells his or her back story. And the whole film takes place against the backdrop of grinding poverty and the Duvalier dictatorship.
It is about sex tourism, but the use of power for sex pervades the entire film from the opening scene when a Haitian mother tries to give her 15 year old daughter to an older Haitian man at the airport, to depictions of the Haitian power elite forcing young girls to become their mistresses. The ability of middle class white women (one is a college professor at Wellesley, another works in a warehouse in Montreal) to buy sex with gifts, food and pocket money is just the most direct example of the relatively powerful using their power for sex.
Continue reading Heading South (Vers Le Sud)