Among the new releases I have seen and liked so far this year, there is not a one that I admired as much as I did this one. THE LONELIEST PLANET is fresh and new, and at the same time solid and assured. It is a marriage of cinematic technique and psychological narrative so balanced and complementary as to make story and image indistinguishable.
The tale is of an engaged couple who, backpacking with a guide through the mountains of Georgia, the ex-Soviet republic, find their sense of each other thrown off balance when one of them acts on a momentary impulse that would have been ignoble had it been intentional rather than reflexive. It happens in an eye-blink and is corrected immediately, but it was enough, when I saw the film, to provoke a gasp from the house, as though our heartbeats had simultaneously quickened.
The impact of the moment arises directly from the temporal and spatial perfection of the filmmaking, which paces the narrative beautifully and frames the images with exquisite skill. There are shots short and long, tracking and stationary, near and far; those that linger on a landscape across which march the three barely visible hikers; those in which faces and bodies fill the screen and everything out-of-frame presses in upon them; others that go along with the lovers as they walk silently or run verb drills in Spanish.
Hani Furstenberg and Gael García Bernal have an ability not all that common among the remarkably attractive, which is to sink into the reality of the moment without a subliminal awareness of their own beauty; they impart this quality to the characters and it is interesting how it changes after the incident that upsets their relationship. The Georgian guide is played by Bidzina Gujabidze, inspiring both pathos and charm with his character’s halting English and awkward efforts at camaraderie. Julia Loktev, working from a short story by Tom Bissell that I now must read, has directed what seems to me a very great film, wise in its silences and vivid in the presences it creates.
Check listings for viewing options.