Voyage en terre solitaire

Is there a reason to like this movie? I can't find one and am surprised by those who do. What is pictured is two young characters who like to walk through rugged terrain, play word games, have sex in the dark, and stay trim. Do I have a reason to like either character? No. What I heard was inane dialog, heavy music as if something was going to happen and doesn't, very little sound of any sort to engage my ears. Was I amused by the word games, liked the music, or understood the inane dialog and stories the players tell? No. I was shown photography of some rugged terrain in the Georgia mountains, a place that few have seen. Was I supposed to be impressed by the beauty and awe of this natural setting? The answer is that it wasn't something I'd seen better done in other movies. The movie seems to suggest that relationships can change radically because of an insignificant happening. But never tell us if they change. I'm still waiting to think of a reason for liking this picture.

Amazing movie. I had absolutely no expectations going in yesterday at the NYC Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall. Even felt disheartened when the director before the start of the movie said " I will see you all after the movie ... If you all are still here".

Long story short at the end of the movie I couldn't help it but had to clap and it was involuntary. I have seen an amazing powerful piece with excellent performances by the whole cast. I do not know how to spell the name of the actress, "Jani" sounds like "Honey". She is amazing.

Please give this movie a shot. I haven't seen any movies lately which touched upon the dynamics between a couple so well.

Bravo to the whole team. Sure I will hear more about this movie in the news and hopefully at the awards.

PS: It is rare for me to post on IMDb, but I had to share :)

The Loneliest Planet - The sophomore effort from writer/director Julia Loktev, this film follows a young American couple as they take a trek through the man's ancestral homeland in Georgia (the nation, not the state)'s Caucus mountains. I am unfamiliar with the director's previous effort (2006's Day Night Day Night) but regret to say that The Loneliest Planet did not really inspire me to seek her earlier work out. The problem lies primarily with the screenplay, especially the first hour, which plays more like high quality excerpts from someone's vacation video than like a narrative picture. NOTHING happens. Okay, that's an exaggeration, there are a FEW bits of characterization and foreshadowing that lend to the storyline. However, with a run time of an hour and fifty odd minutes, the movie's first seventy-five could easily have been cut to thirty without detracting from the (minimal) story that the script sets out to tell. Without the lovely cinematography contributed by Inti Briones, the first half of the film would be practically unwatchable.

Gael Garcia Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries, Y Tu Mama Tambien) and Hani Furstenberg (Yossi and Jagger) do respectable jobs as the vacationing couple, but are not really given enough dialog or activity to really show us what they are capable of. First time actor Bidzina Gujabidze actually outshines them both as their tour guide, his "local color" helping to bridge some of the more debilitatingly slow passages of the film, but even he is fighting an uphill battle. I can appreciate the point of Loktev's story, but it just didn't constitute a two hour movie. It might have made a nice short film...2 1/2 of 5 stars.

Review brought to you by www.TheMovieFrog.com

Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg are an engaged couple backpacking in Georgia along with their local guide. Along the way, they meet up with some locals and one incident causes a major rift between the couple. It is not really spoken of but yet it surely existed. The question then becomes can they heal the rift and reconnect.

I understand the need for this to be understated. That's what's so important here. We don't want some drag out screaming match. But understated doesn't have to mean grindingly slow. At times, there's too many no-talking-slow-walking-long-distance-extended scenes. Those aren't all necessary. Cut those down and insert more dialog.

If, as the famous line from Love Story says, "love means never having to say you're sorry," then Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg), a young couple engaged to be married in a few months, are on the right track. Summer vacationing in the Caucasus Mountains in the Republic of Georgia, Julia Loktev's slow-paced but haunting film, The Loneliest Planet, follows the pair as they trek across the wilderness with back-packs on their shoulders. Based on the short story by Tom Bissell, "Expensive Trips Nowhere" which had its roots in an Ernest Hemingway story called "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, it is a thought-provoking film that has moments of brilliance, but its strict adherence to minimalism and the emotional distance it creates can be a barrier to full engagement.

Using minimal dialogue, meaning is conveyed mostly by images, silences and sound; the sound of rocks crunching, of water falling, of footsteps walking, at times aided by the lovely music of English composer Richard Skelton. Ironically, it is an exceedingly intimate film yet, as photographed by Chilean Inti Briones, yet it has a sense of vast and empty, almost alien space that makes it look indeed like the loneliest planet. In the first frame, we hear a constant banging without knowing the source until we see the naked red-haired Nica bouncing up and down in a washbasin looking as if she's freezing. Soon the bearded Alex hurriedly throws a bucket of warm water on her.

We do not learn anything about the characters other than what is apparent in their immediate surroundings and the fact that they are lovers. The first part of the film is mostly playful as Nica and Alex make their way through the mountains or stop in the villages, having sex and drinking, conjugating verbs in Spanish, doing stand-on-your-head exercises, or rolling down a hill. Hiking across unknown territory in a country where you cannot speak the language, a fate common to most world travelers, can be daunting and often requires a guide. At one of their village stops, Alex and Nica hire a local guide named Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze, a real-life mountaineer) who speaks halting English and is not averse to telling dubious stories with racial overtones.

Loktev utilizes a documentary-type approach, concentrating on the everyday and the banal, yet there is an uneasy feeling that something unanticipated is going to happen. Around the mid-point of the film, as a result of Alex's thoughtless reaction to a threatening event, the dynamic of the relationship shifts. Sullen looking and uncommunicative, they walk either in front or behind one another. Neither Alex nor Nica talk about the incident presumably out of embarrassment, or because they do not know what to say, seemingly confused about what just happened and what it means for their relationship.

The event seems to be saying, as suggested by the director, that traditional gender roles are still important. In an interview, Loktev states, "The film reaffirms very traditional gender roles. They're hiking a mountain. That's a place where traditional gender roles would show, I'd think. It reaffirms those traditional roles. That for me is the contradiction, for me personally. That I think of myself as a feminist, but I catch myself where I want a man to be a man. I want a man to be a real man." The meaning of the critical event, however, is very much open to interpretation. Loktev relates that, at a showing, she heard two people sitting next to each other in the theatre who saw it as two very different movies.

One said that the incident in the film is something no couple can ever recover from, while the other one asked, "What's the big deal?" This only underscores the point that Nica, though she could have interpreted the incident in several different ways, decides that what occurred was significant without confirming her judgment with the person most involved or attempting to see the other person's point of view, a primer of what does not work in relationships. If, as Werner Erhard put it, love is accepting someone the way that they are and the way they are not, then The Loneliest Planet, for all its remarkable qualities, in my view sends the wrong message and misses the opportunity for an important teachable moment.