The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev) [87 points / 8 votes]
"There wasn’t a runaway first-place epic in 2012 along the lines of my choices in previous years. Instead, there was a glut of extremely interesting, deceptively simple “little” films. For me, the Best Film of 2012 was a four-way tie between The Loneliest Planet, The Kid with a Bike, Oslo August 31st and Goodbye First Love. All are quiet, expert dissections of relationships.
Asked to arbitrarily pick one from the group, I went with The Loneliest Planet, Julia Loktev’s relational pre-mortem. Planet is the “simplest” of the aforementioned bunch, relying on only three characters doing essentially one thing – hiking -- through the whole movie. The film’s source material -- Tom Bissell’s short story “Expensive Trips Nowhere” – is an acknowledged riff on Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis MacComber": man, woman, and guide hike through Eurasian hinterlands; man fails woman during key moment, woman cuckolds man with guide.
Leaving aside the savage brilliance of Inti Briones’ cinematography and the flawless performances by the three leads, Loktev’s film is remarkable as an example of transcendent adaptation. I mean no slight against Bissell’s story, but Loktev takes the skeleton of the story and infuses it with mystery and, most importantly, SPACE. Her approach to the material reminds me of Carl Th. Dreyer’s approach to set design: keep stripping everything away until only the essentials remain (and, even then, jettison as many “essentials” as you can). What remains is a beautiful look at a relationship unraveling before it’s even properly raveled. Loktev has taken the source material’s jaded married couple and turned them into a recently engaged pair with their wedding awaiting them once they return to the States. Again, this is a deceptively small tweak but one that turns a potentially cynical take on relationships into a protective (but still hopeful) view.
The film exalts in space -- both geographic and psycho-spiritual. There’s a lot of quiet and a lot of time watching the characters wander quietly through the Caucasus. This emptiness isn’t for everyone. In Roger Ebert’s ** ½ star review, he cites this as a detriment:
“All of this grows tiresome. We're given no particular reason at the outset of "The Loneliest Planet" to care about these people, our interest doesn't grow along the way, the landscape grows repetitive, the director's approach is aggressively minimalist...”
Eh. One man’s aggressive minimalism is another’s cherished subtlety. And the characters are drawn with enough subtlety that each works at one time or another as an audience surrogate. As to the charge of not caring: I feel like the film’s brief, pre-hike prologue imbues the couple with enough Everyperson stakes that, if you’ve ever been in an unstable relationship, there’s enough to care about. (I also hate the “we don’t care about these people” argument as a rule; does Bernal have to announce that he plans on saving a bunch of orphan puppies at the end of the trip to make us root for him? Isn’t shared humanity enough to make us invest?)
Finally, the brilliance of Planet lies in its fulcrum scene, which takes Godard’s adage about only needing a girl and a gun to make a film in a fascinating, exhilarating direction. Maybe it’s because it’s surrounded by so much space, but it’s a master stroke of dramatic tension and one of the best directed scenes of the year. I won’t spoil it, but it alone is worth the hike." - Philip Tatler IV
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