A unique, brilliantly structured art-house film that will definitely go down as one of my favorites from the past few years. It's a film that has, really, only a single plot point, and it's one that happens in a blink of an eye. The film centers on two tourists in Georgia (the country, not the state). Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg play an engaged couple, and the first half of the film establishes quite clearly their dynamics, and the fact that they are very much in love. Halfway through the film, the pivotal incident occurs and it's like a prism that breaks up the way the two look at each other, as well as themselves. Sure, that first hour is pretty slow moving (though the scenery in the film is so gorgeous that I was never less than engaged),but, after the incident, you look backward at every small thing that occurred. That first, sleepy hour I was basically just enjoying the scenery, but during the second hour my mind was running a mile a minute, even though, basically, nothing much was happening. It's a weird and uncompromising picture that will surely drive some crazy, but I was absolutely blown away by it.

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.

30 December 2012. This movie would be better named "The Movie With The Loneliest Audience" as it is only a collection of colorful vistas with no compelling theme, a number of extras speaking a foreign language with no subtitles and little audience understanding, and finally a couple frolicking. The movie has no direction, no purpose, and no interesting occurrences that stand out from others movies. The sex scenes are either confusing or odd, lack real dramatic relational connection being employed disjointedly or shot in darkened, indistinguishable ways while reminding one of History of Violence (2005) or The Cooler (2003) that offer more graphic and cinematically appealing sexual presentations. Unlike Lost in Translation (2003),this movie's set up has a couple who know each other, understand some of the foreign language they encounter, lacking a backstory and needed character development that distances the audience. In Translation Bill Murray's character like the audience didn't understand Japanese and the audience could relate to the cultural disorientation, provided a brief backstory of Murray's character's attitude of his presence in Japan and introducing a female stranger where the audience didn't need a backstory because just as Murray's character discovered more about her so does the audience through out that movie. The Loneliest Planet shot in an uninteresting, lazy homemade video format doesn't take time for the audience to come to care for these characters, who presented superficially without any depth. While they aren't stereotypical, they appear as empty shells of humanity. There is an extended scene of the back of the girl's red curvaceous hair flopping around (re-occurring again later in the movie in a dilapidated structure) as she and her boyfriend and guide are bouncing about in a vehicle, the characters seeing something much more interesting than what the audience is forced to see, suggesting the audience really isn't as important as the characters and literally being given the backseat. There is an overly long vast landscape scene as the tiny figures trek on a narrow path that is carried along only by the background music and again one is reminded of the more awesome, emotive and mysterious isolated scene from The Name of the Rose (1986) that evokes a primal sense of loneliness, powerlessness, and even fear or similarly ponderous but considered artistically classical and effective scenes are found in Andrei Tarkovskiy's Solaris (1972). But such scenes in this movie eventually becomes uninteresting, disconnected accompanied by what becomes screeching music repeated again and again throughout the movie. One instead is reminded of how Peter Weller melded the haunting landscape into the very fabric of the storyline in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Here, in this movie the landscape is as disconnected to the story as the audience is disconnected to the movie. But unlike The Loneliest Planet, even with the somewhat flawed Into The Wild (2007),director/actor Sean Penn had an artistic eye and was able to capture the look of many of the scenes as if art pieces in themselves. The use of long slow shots with minimal action become ponderous unlike the Lost in Translation or Melancholia (2011) that possess a meaningful enveloping contexts for audience connecting them to deeper emotions derived from passive setting and details. The movie's supposedly big incident involving a threat of harm to our couple that was predictable, lacking suspense, diminished a overly long scene with a long sterile barrel of a rifle and the focus on the man instead of the stranger threatening him. The girl's emotions and fear are completely obviated by her being hidden behind the man taking the audience further taken away from intimacy of the scene, a confusing manipulated scripted exercise in futility. Instead one is reminded of the amazing delicate directorial handling of the intimate facial close ups that enable the characters in Les Miserable (2012) to have their emotional turmoil and suffering projected towards the audience connecting them with a deeply human and empathic experience. Later a dripping water scene also reminds one of the more amazing, psychological tortuously delicious "auditory" scene filmed towards the end of Touching The Void. Such scenes in The Loneliest Planet would have better placed earlier in the movie as the texture and the landscape appears wondrous and intriguing would have been consistently edited together with the characters initial wonder and exploratory interest on their beginning of their journey. Its placement here only detracts from the more important psychological focus of the characters themselves relegating this fascinating geological feature to an afterthought, just like the audience. The audience is further subjected to inane singing cat jokes by the girl around a darkened campfire revealing for the first time a big ugly gaping space between her two upper front teeth detracting from the scene. There's a cutaway to a brief scene of the boyfriend in a tent who oddly covers his eyes even though it's dark, instead of his ears. The movie then cuts back a confusing campfire shot due to the use a different camera angle and lighting from the earlier shot which is off-putting and unnecessarily disorienting. Finally a little background of these characters is revealed and strangely, sadly the tourist guide's own brief personal story is more interesting than the movie itself. In what is supposedly the most dramatic scene ends up subdued rather than dramatic, deflated rather than convincing or powerful, without any earlier setup to sustain an interesting emotional tension, and becomes a jumble of confusion as to who did what to whom and where in the darkness, leaving the audience in the same darkness. In sum, this is one of the most confusing, rambling, uninteresting films produced. The final scene is a wide shot of a magnificent landscape of river, gorge, and mountain vista with small figures breaking down their camp, their expressions too indistinct to offer any valuable or meaningful insight as to what the human component of this movie is moving towards as an ending, almost as if nothing of real consequence occurred throughout the movie.