American and French films, in particular, occasionally vary boys’-night-out comedy fare with exotic spice in such locations as the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, but director/co-writer Laurent Cantet’s Heading South/Vers le sud is uniquely serious and for once from the girls’ side of things.

Set in the sinister days of the Duvaliers père et fils, when the capital’s sole paved street fronted the Presidential Palace of “Baby Doc,” this movie plays out the frustrations and illusions of white North American women against the poverty and Tontons Macoute-enforced oppression that brood over an artificial holiday heaven. The film had its germ in the French director’s first Haiti vacation four years ago, his fascination with and revulsion at the island’s paradoxes and, on the flight back home, reading the Dany Laferrière stories collected as La chair du maître (Flesh of the Master, 1997). Determined on a concrete situation and, thus, location shooting, he was forced to hold the project until relative calm after Aristide’s ouster, during which delay he and Robin Campillo worked on rendering filmable the “not very cinematographic, it is true, . . . first-person more confessions than dramatic monologues” of three stories, three women.

A recently more visible Charlotte Rampling is Ellen, at fifty-five a Wellesley professor of French literature whose last six long vacations have been spent at a Hotel Petite Anse cottage, enjoying from locals the sexual attention denied women over forty in that “stuck-up city Boston.” Smugly presiding over a group of similarly minded tourist ladies, she hides selfishness and fear under a veneer of uncommitted, gift-purchased relationships.

Also veiling his heart, filled with old loathing for the pale “invaders, occupiers, who dared step on Haitian soil” and for his own subservience as well, dignified Albert (Lys Ambroise) manages the segregated spa from behind non-committal eyes and, politely refusing a desperate woman’s offer of her adolescent daughter, picks up new arrival Brenda (Karen Young) from the airport. Not exactly a newcomer, however, she is escaping a sour married life and returning after three Valium-sustained years aching for her black island lover “like an addiction.”

Although there is an artificial shield against the dark despair of the nation, trouble brews right here in paradise, too, initially in an innocuous rivalry, for anxious frustrated Brenda’s erstwhile stud Legba (Ménothy Cesar) is now Ellen’s toy boy. Beneath that professor’s philosophical cool lurks a possessive cruelty tempered by a certain realism that clashes with the romanticism of the maybe ten years younger Savannah, Georgia, arrival.

Some of the tale is actually told, as in effect the film slows while, say, on her bed Brenda speaks shyly to the camera-viewer. Really, not too much should be made of this fact of extra-dramatic monologues, sparely resorted to and, like the film stock, color, mirror reflections and acting itself, only at first awkwardly old-fashioned but gradually merging into a feel for the 1970s.

The third heroine individualized is Sue (Louise Portal), manageress of a Montreal kitchen-parts warehouse who humorously dismisses the embarrassed men who work under her. Brunette and fleshier, she would keep things simple and is content with her local fisherman beau Neptune (Wilfried Paul), neither demanding nor lavishing. But she cannot stem the coming flood, nor can the others, who would be lover, mother and provider, for these bought younger men have their own agendas and lives beyond the white enclave, and out there where corruption, suspicion, brutality, a police state, and death occur.

We do not see much of this unsanitized Haiti, but, hovering, it is enough. Legba initiates and jealously protects adolescent Eddy (Jackenson Pierre Olmo Diaz) in both worlds, and has his impoverished concerned mother, his soccer mates and female fans, and a resurfaced former special friend (Anotte Saint Ford), now unhappily the bejeweled, Mercedes 3000-chauffeured kept woman of a dangerous colonel but seeking from among “many lovers, my only true friend and confidant,” Legba.

The two American blondes, and the two island worlds, are on a collision course in this film which is as layered as Ellen’s hair. Her interpretation of a final act of double violence -- which Cantet stresses is not his own personal take -- reveals her sudden helpless awareness of the two separate yet overlapping realms, whereas Brenda’s subsequent course will appear either shallow or else realistic. “I do not judge my characters,” nor should we: in the kingdom of sex, politics and sexual politics, it is rightly every woman for herself. 

(Released by Shadow Distribution; not rated by MPAA.)