The Loneliest Planet

The Loneliest Planet – Literally a long and hard slog over difficult terrain, The Loneliest Planet (2012) chronicles a hiking trip that goes badly wrong.  A handsome young man, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, and his fiancée have decided to vacation in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia.  (This seems an odd choice for a pre-nuptial camping trip).  The couple hire a sinister-looking guide who doesn’t speak much English to lead them around the mountains.  The film is unclear about how long this improbable excursion is supposed to last or whether it has some ultimate objective.  The characters traipse about in picturesque and rugged country for several days, encountering realistically depicted hardships – there are streams that have to be forded, rough boulder-fields to traverse, and some filthy-looking glacial ice that they stagger across.  It rains and there is sleet and people get wet and uncomfortable.  About half-way through the film, the picture pivots around a short scene in which the hikers encounter some inscrutable bandits.  One of the bandits suddenly points his rifle at the couple and Bernal’s character instinctively shelters himself behind the young woman, efficiently rotating her between him and the antiquated rifle pointed at them.  Although he reverses positions with her in a couple of seconds and faces the gun-barrel himself, the damage is done.  No one mentions the faux-pax, which is all that it is (the bandits depart as inexplicably as they appeared) – but the trip is completely ruined.  From that point forth, the man and woman are surly and uncommunicative.  The woman seems to be looking for evidence that her boyfriend no longer loves her and, when he sulks in the nice North Face tent that they have lugged up to the stony alpine meadows, she gets drunk with the guide and lets him kiss her.  In the middle of the night, she is sick and vomits.  The next morning, the film ends with a final shot of the miserable hikers striking their camp.  The entire movie is built around extended sequences in which the camera tracks the characters slogging across the rough and steep landscape.  The director, Julia Loktev, shoots the film according to strict and abstract parameters.  She has banished from the picture any semblance of explication or back-story – we don’t know who the characters are or why they are wandering around the empty, rugged valleys of the Caucasus. (The man and woman entertain one another by conjugating irregular Spanish verbs).  Many sequences are shot in a way intended to mystify the viewer.  For instance, the opening scene shows the young woman completely naked jumping up and down in what looks like a cellar and, then, being showered with water that the hero ladles over her from a pitcher – what is going on here?  There are lengthy sequences in whichpeople speak in Georgian and we have no idea what is being said.  We have no idea what the young people do for a living, whether they are students or graduate students, or why exactly they are together.  The only figure in the movie with any kind of history is the guide who tells the young woman about his divorce and his marital difficulties in halting English that is essentially unintelligible – the guide is played by a very famous Georgian mountaineer, Bidzina Gujabidze, and he has enormous presence, basically eclipsing the sullen performances by Bernal and young woman played by Hani Fursternberg.  Most impressively, Loktev shoots the landscape footage, which is very impressive, according to this parametric rule:  don’t ever show anything but the terrain that the people are crossing and avoid any shots that would show the mountain peaks that are apparently the raison d’etre for the hike.  Loktev keeps the camera resolutely pointed at the ground.  Natural wonders are shot from perverse angles – for instance, we see a large thermal feature, but never from the distance, only as a series of travertine terraces against which the moving camera tracks the actors.  Only in the final scene, which must bear the symbolic burden of the entire film, are we granted an image of the mountains – here a jagged group of snowy peaks at the head of the valley where the protagonists have been camping.  This last image, with the mountains finally visible, suggests a liberation from the emotional and physical misfortune that the film depicts, a sense that the characters may be able, perhaps, to move on or, at least, away from the event that seems to have wrecked their vacation.  The subject matter is probably too slight for a feature-length picture and was trite when Hemingway wrote “The short happy life of Francis Macomber” and the film feels contrived, abstract, and bloodless while you are watching it.  But The Loneliest Planet does expand in the imagination and its long silences and incoherent conversations, which are annoying in real time, seem justified when you review the movie in your mind.  It’s an austere work of art, not necessarily entertaining and mostly without much in the way of narrative and founded on the slightest reed of an idea, but the thing is true to its intentions and honestly as well as effectively constructed.  The realistic and somewhat embarrassing sex scenes are crucial to the film because they establish the physical intimacy between the man and woman that is disrupted by the encounter with the bandits.  The films that the picture seems to synthesize are Gus Van Zandt’s Gerry, also about a hike in the wilderness that goes awry, and Kelly Reichardt’s Beckett-style Western,Meek’s Cut-off.  This is one of those pictures that is better, and more intelligent, than it seems when you are watching it.