Review of Heading South

The real problem with this movie is NOT that it depicts "women having fun", as another reviewer stated. It's that the women who were having the fun were disproportionately powerful in relation to the men with whom they were having the fun. The relationships were clearly exploitative, and the women were clearly lacking in awareness into their own motivations. So, for example, at least two of the three women (Ellen and Brenda) were in love, or at the very least emotionally dependent upon their relationship with the main male protagonist, Legba. Yet they seemed, for the most part, to be oblivious to their own inner workings and feelings.

As such, it was impossible to feel any empathy for any of the women in this film. If that was the director's intent, then he succeeded. Furthermore, if it was the director's intent to show the power imbalance between the women and the men in this film, then I'd have to say he succeeded in that as well. But ironically, these apparent successes were achieved in spite of, rather than because of, the words the characters were saying. And that's usually a bad thing in a film. Unless, of course, that really was the director's intent from the start. In that case, he did an excellent job of portraying stupid, selfish, arrogant, Colonialist middle aged white women exploiting the poor residents of an oppressed country.