THE LONELIEST PLANET - Review by Joe Calleri

What – THE LONELIEST PLANET (MOVIE)

Where and When - Released through Palace films on 21 March, 2013, and in Melbourne will screen at Palace Cinema Como, Palace Brighton Bay, and Cinema Nova.

Reviewer - Joe Calleri.
Stars – 2.

Full Disclosure - I attended a media screening of this movie.

Running at a ponderous 113 minutes, Russian-American director Julia Loktev’s third movie, The Loneliest Planet, demands much from its audience by way of attention and near infinite patience, but there is precious little by way of a pay-off in terms of story, drama, or character development.

An obviously adventurous, though naïve, thirty-something, engaged couple, Alex (Gael Garcia Bernal, who is probably best known to international audiences for his outstanding turn as Che Guevara in 2004’s, The Motorcycle Diaries) and Nica (Israeli-American actress, Hani Furstenburg) are inexplicably back-packing through, of all places, the rather beautiful, but terrifyingly remote and still dangerous, former Soviet Union republic of Georgia.

Alex and Nica, inexplicably, set off on the hiking / trekking equivalent of a road trip, along with an un-named Georgian guide, played by Georgian actor, Bidzina Gujabidze who reveals himself to be a comedian and competent amateur magician, as well as the most complex and emotionally layered of the three leading characters in this movie.

Frustratingly for audiences, Loktev provides only the skimpiest of factual snippets regarding the intrepid Alex and Nica. Besides their established sense of adventure (some may call it grandiose stupidity), we learn that, Alex speaks fluent Spanish, and Nica tells us he sings well. We never hear Alex sing. Nica, is thirty, has travelled widely to many remote destinations, enjoys alcohol, sex, and smoking a joint or two. Where these two have come from, how they met, why they are in Georgia, why they are trekking (the two are not photographers, and don’t pause to admire, linger, or even comment in any way on the physical beauty around them, so, presumably they are not nature lovers), and exactly where they are trekking to, Loktev never discloses. Rather, Loktev leaves us to speculate all of these important details.

As audience members, we become the willing fourth, and unseen travellers on this aimless trek, trudging, cold, wet and miserable, through the remote Georgian country-side, tempting fate and possible disaster with every single step we take.

So, when the travellers are by chance met by three tribesmen (presumably a father and his two sons), one carrying a rifle, who points his rifle right between Alex’s eyes, after a brief, yet furious exchange between the guide and tribesmen, rather than take that as a sign from God to turn the heck around and return from whence they came, the trio merely silently, and glumly, continue their tedious, trudging trek. Two further incidents, the first, when Nica falls fully clothed, into a freezing cold stream, the second when she shares a passionate kiss with the guide, which, for more rational folk, would represent more screaming danger signs to stop and turn around, barely affect our tenacious trio.   

So, when the closing scene finally arrives, set against a background of the beautiful Georgian wilderness as the trio quietly, and slowly dismantle their tents, many may, like me, breathe an enormous sigh of relief that this movie has come to an uneventful end, and that the three are still alive. One can but mediate on the possibility that, the trio resemble modern-day Sisyphuses, lost, disconnected souls who are forever doomed to wander the remote wilds of Georgian landscape until … well, who knows, and, ultimately, who really cares.