‘Homecoming’ Review: Catherine Corsini’s Stirring, Superbly Performed French Family Drama

Catherine Corsini’s movies tend to be intimate affairs backed by a strong cast, but some of them work better than others. Early films like La Répétition or Les Ambitieux brought new blood to the French drama and comedy, respectively, while more recent efforts like Three Worlds and The Divide felt overwrought and too politically on the nose, hammering their messages home in unsubtle ways.  

Despite being mired in controversy prior to its selection in Cannes, the 66-year-old director’s eleventh feature, Homecoming (Le Retour), turns out to be one of her finest movies in a long time. It has Corsini doing what she does best — guiding actors toward intense and stirring performances, telling stories that can be dark and light at the same time — in a way that feels nearly effortless. And it’s driven by two superb rising talents, Suzy Bemba (Drift) and Esther Gohourou (Cuties), playing a pair of sisters who return to their native Corsica after a long absence, learning much about themselves in the process.

In many ways, Homecoming follows the template of a classic vacation movie — a genre that the French, who seem to have more vacations than anyone else on the planet, have excelled in for decades. (Examples include Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Adieu Philippine and Pauline at the Beach, and there are many others.)

After an intense prologue where we see young Black mother Khédidja (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna, who won a César for The Divide) fleeing Corsica with her two little girls in tow, we cut to 15 years later, when the three of them are on their way back to the island for a visit. The girls, Jessica (Bemba) and Farah (Gohourou), are now full-blown teens, with all the drama that entails, and while they ostensibly return so that Khédidja can serve as a nanny to a rich Parisian family, there’s a lot more at stake.

Co-written by Corsini and Naïla Guiguet (who collaborated on Louis Garrel’s hit movie, The Innocent), the script flawlessly shifts between the characters, following their separate storylines while digging further into the family’s collective and tragic past, which involved the death of the girls’ father when they were still too young to remember him.

Why that death came about is a mystery that Corsini laces throughout the film, making it a trauma that hangs over everyone’s head and prompts some of Khédidja’s secretive behavior. But that plot is ultimately less compelling than the parallel coming-of-age narratives of Jessica and Farah, both of whom experience love for the first time during their trip.

In the case of the scholarly Jessica, who’s been accepted to Paris’ prestigious Sciences-Po university, this involves a budding romance with Gaia (Lomane de Deitrich), the daughter of the Parisian couple (Denis Podalydès and Virginie Ledoyen) Khédidja works for. In the case of Farah, who’s been left to her own devices and winds up stealing drugs from a Corsican bad boy (Harold Orsoni), it means getting close to a guy she’s supposed to hate.

There’s nothing altogether novel about those stories, but they feel that way because of Bemba and Gohouru, who bring a level of charisma, and, in the latter’s case, natural comedy, to roles that seem to have been tailor-made for them. Both play girls who are fish out of water on a breathtakingly gorgeous island that’s also known for being incredibly insular and unwelcoming to non-Corsicans, especially if they’re not white.

The racial element is an important factor in Homecoming, and yet Corsini doesn’t make it the centerpiece of her film, which is ultimately about a family coming to terms with a loss they tried to escape for too long. When race does pop up, it’s in the form of petty comments or observations, or in the way Farah, especially, looks so uncomfortable on a beach where she’s the only Black girl around. She resorts to selling drugs, although she falls for a local guy who turns out to be way more misbehaved than she is.

Jessica, meanwhile, goes from being the goody-goody to something of an out-of-control bad girl — an evolution provoked by a major discovery she makes about her family, culminating in an extended tragicomic party sequence where she drops Molly, goes bananas and passes out.

The film isn’t always subtle, and like much of the director’s work it sometimes teeters on melodrama, particularly in the way Khédidja reckons with her past in the third act. But it’s also undoubtedly moving, whether in its portrayal of two sisters growing up, and slowly growing apart, or of a mother accepting the big mistakes she’s made in the past. A sequence where Khédidja makes a confession to Jessica via text message is sure to be one of the most emotional scenes in this year’s competition.

Corsini perfects a fluid, naturalistic style in Homecoming — the film was shot by regular DP Jeanne Lapoirie, who exploits the island setting to its fullest — that doesn’t overstate things, drawing emotions out in organic ways. This is due in a large part to the two young leads, who can be both nonchalant and devastating at the same time, as well as to the excellent Diallo Sagna, playing a mother who hasn’t always done what’s best for her children, even if she’s always done it out of love. The three of them liven up a movie that, in the end, isn’t anything new under the sun, but feels like a fresh start.