THE LONELIEST PLANET (Julia Loktev 2011)

[Chris Knipp]

US RELEASE - ORIGINALLY REVIEWED FOR THE NYTFF 2011

Julia Loktev: THE LONELIEST PLANET (2011)

http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/4873/loneliestplanet.jpg
GAEL BARCÍA BERNAL, BIDZINE GUJABIDZE AND HANI FURSTENBERG IN THE LONELIEST PLANET

Two paths diverge in the wild

Hardy and sophisticated offbeat travelers both, Nica (Hani Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael García Bernal), who are to be married in a few months, take a camping trip through the Caucasus with a Georgian mountain guide, Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze). Along the way -- at the film's midpoint -- an incident happens that breaks the cozy mood between them, possibly forever. After Alec makes a split decision that shocks Nica, the two become distant. The title is perhaps a mocking reference to the rough tour guide series, "Lonely Planet." Nica and Alex seem to be intimate and perfectly matched and the trip is gong pretty smoothly, but it all seems to turn into a subtle psychological hell.

This is the sophomore feature of Julia Loktev, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and grew up in the US, studying film at NYU. Her first film was a documentary, Moment of Impact, which focused on the consequences of a near-fatal car accident that her father suffered. Her first fiction feature, Day Night Day Night (shown at Lincoln Center's New Directors/New Films series in 2007), was about a would-be suicide bomber in Times Square. The director has also exhibited art pieces at Tate Modern and P.S.1, and recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Loktev achieves great immediacy in the way she shoots the pair early on bathing, cuddling, and making love in rough surroundings, seemingly in perfect tune with each other. Israel-based, NY-born Furstenburg has luminous skin and flaming red hair; García Bernal has his usual charisma and charm. The pair are almost too clearly cast for each having both playful and melancholy sides: it's almost as if they play only in those two keys. Gujabidze has no particular charm, and his English is a bit rough. But that's the point. He's a real mountaineer and guide, not an actor, and his presence adds to the documentary feel. The other player is the grass-covered, beautiful Khevi region of the Caucasus, which helps mitigate the monotony of an adventure that for the viewer is lacking in much of interest, unless reviewing Spanish verbs, crossing a stream, or doing tricks with a string fascinate you.

The film uses much more limited material and more rudimentary dialogue, but plays with space and time in ways that might suggest the Antonioni of L'Avventura. And in both films events lead up to an event that changes things and that's never fully understood. Whatever the mid-point event in Loneliest Planet means to the characters, they don't discuss it.

Loktev works well in her harsh style. For me, a richer and more nuanced study of the decline of a seemingly perfect relationship between two young people can be found in Maren Ade's Everyone Else, which was part of the 2009 NYFF, and got a limited US theatrical release in 2010. I reviewed (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2644-New-York-Film-Festival-2009&postid=23022#post23022)it as part of the NYFF. For some, The Loneliest Planet is a maddening snooze-fest, yet another example of how an art film can be like watching paint dry. But for the attentive, adventurous festival viewer, its fresh, raw approach offers stimulation and food for thought.

The Loneliest Planet is a an exhausting, intense watching experience, all the more focused for its vivid immediacy and lack of many plot or dialogue guidelines. It's a taut, effective film, with some pure landscape moments enhanced by Richard Skelton's spare, shimmering music. But Loktev doesn't make as good use as she might of the rearrangement of sensibility. She tends to rely too much toward the end on randomly accumulated material, and the last two sequences are weak. The way Nika and Alex are thrust upon us without backstories, along with the lack of discussion of events, contributes to a mystery that makes this a movie audiences will want to debate. For me the situation suggests a failure of nerve, the kind of thing you might find in a Hemingway short story about a couple game hunting, though his famous "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomer" is almost the reverse of this tale, which is freely adapted from the story, "Expensive Trips Nowhere," by Tom Bissell. In the wild, with a guide, an urban civilized man's courage may be more sorely and starkly tested. Maybe this story could take place anywhere. Loktev has tried to eschew pretty-pretty effects, but the lush, wide-open Georgian landscape is still a bit too distracting. However she is true to the original story: Bissell's fiction generally transpires in Central Asian settings.

The Loneliest Planet was shown at Locarno and Toronto and later at the New York (2011) and London (2012) festivals. Seen and reviewed as part of the 49th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, 2011. US release finally came Oct. 26, 2012, with critical raves.

I may have been hard on it, if you judge by them. In a thumbnail review for The New Yorker. Richard Brody describes (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/film/the_loneliest_planet_lokte) the finale of what he calls this "variation on a theme by Ernest Hemingway" thus: "Yet just as the archly framed hike seems ready to sink into a miasma of flip condescension, something astonishing happens—the couple encounter another rural wanderer, whose threats prompt Alex into an act of cowardice from which the relationship seems unlikely to recover. Loktev’s staging of the crucial moment is expert; her look at the aftermath is poignant and nuanced, culminating in a nocturnal sequence that condenses a world of bitter and incommensurable experience—and an unexpectedly stringent morality—into a single shot. In English and Georgian."

[tabuno]

It's apparent that Chris's commentary isn't the run of mill typical movie film critique and it hasn't really helped me to decide whether or not to go see it, it's such a great description that both intrigues but dissuades. With too little money and too little time, it's hard to decide based on Chris's articulate, luscious passages about this film...it's almost tempted to see it because not because of the film but Chris's description of it.

[Chris Knipp]

If you're tempted, maybe you should go. But I can't promise if you'll like it or not. Is it showing nearby?

[tabuno]

This is Utah, not the This is The Place (our Mormon motto). I'll probably end up seeing in on Netflix or Hulu one of these years. Probably safer anyway. I can always stop watching it in the middle without little or no regrets if it should come to that. I'll put the movie on my to see list though.

[Chris Knipp]

That makes sense. Though the advantage of a big screen watch if it's a hard watch you still don't stop. But if you have it at home you may not make it through.

[tabuno]

This 113-minute movie enabled me to write a 10-page treatise consisting of 4,353 words that rip this movie apart as the worst movie produced. Scathing in my condemnation, I don't want to waste my time duplicating it here. Julia doesn't need to read what I have to say, it would be too cruel. I may post a shorter edited version on IMDb of exactly what a movie shouldn't be. A great but tedious learning experience. I'm sorry, but Chris you are much too kind to this female director who may need to find another career to save herself the embarrassment and allow the audience not to be subjected to such films in the future.

P.S. Saw it on the small monitor screen through Netflix. I can't say that spending money for the ticket and gasoline travel costs would make up for what would be a few amazing landscape shots. Better seen in an art gallery.

[Chris Knipp]

The Loneliest Planet. Good that it's on instant-play on Netflix, so people can access it easily. For sure though the big landscapes that come through well only on a big theatrical screen are an important element. This is certainly a highly debatable movie, if people can just get to see it to debate it.

I look forward to seeing the shortened version of your review/pan/discussion, tabuno.

Some sharp mostly probably younger people at the NY Film Festival liked it. I tried to see what they saw. That's why my review to you seems "much too kind." I did not personally like it and tend to think there's "no there there." But isn't that what they said about Antonioni?

Mike D'Angelo (relatively much younger than I but not a kid) in his new 15 Best Films of 2012 (http://yearendlists.com/2012/12/mike-dangelo-15-best-films-of-2012/) list, puts The Loneliest Planet at number 3, no less, and I am always interested in his views even though I naturally don't always agree with all of them. Actually in his new final 2012 list there are a couple I don't like and a couple I haven't even seen but all the rest actually are films I do admire.


Mike D’Angelo: 15 Best Films of 2012 (as published by The A.V. Club)

1. Holy Motors – Leos Carax
2. The Imposter – Bart Layton
3. The Loneliest Planet – Julia Loktev
4. Miss Bala – Gerardo Naranjo
5. Moonrise Kingdom – Wes Anderson
6. Amour – Michael Haneke
7. The Deep Blue Sea – Terence Davies
8. Only The Young – Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims
9. Looper – Rian Johnson
10. This Must Be The Place – Paolo Sorrentino
11. Haywire – Stephen Soderbergh
12. You Are Here – Daniel Cockburn
13. It’s Such A Beautiful Day – Don Hertzfeldt
14. Argo – Ben Affleck
15. Sister – Ursula Meier

I haven't seen: It's Such a Beautiful Day, You Are Here, or Only the Young. (Only the Young sounds great.) I think Argo is overrated and I do not like Haywire or The Loneliest Planet. But Holy Motors, Moonrise Kingdom, Amour -- those are the year's best for sure. I very much like The Deep Blue Sea, Looper, Miss Bala, The Imposter, and Sister. It seems like an original list, bearing out my impression that D'Angelo forms his judgments very independently -- even as he is very much in constant touch with a clique of independent critics of his same age group and general orientation (whatever that may mean). I think he was stunned, in a good way, by The Loneliest Planet (as we're supposed to be) -- as he also was by Holy Motors. So there you are. There's something there. We just missed it. And you and I, tabuno, are probably going to go on thinking Loktov's film is smug and maddening. And "better seen in an art gallery" also seems right to me too; only it's not made to be seen in an art gallery. It's made for the kind of cinematic audience that likes mind-twisters like Certified copy.

In Film Comment's 50 Best Films of 2012 l (http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/50-best-films-of-2012)ist based on a wide poll, The Loneliset Planet came in at no. 17 of the 50. Its Metacritic rating is 76.

[oscar jubis]

I decided to post a comment about TLP I had posted elsewhere:

" I have been enjoying for many years a type of "festival film" such as The Loneliest Planet that involves close observation of actors in deceptively simple, lightly plotted scenarios. These films tend to emphasize real time ordinariness or dailiness. Two very different films come to mind as being trend sources and they are Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975) and Abbas Kiarostami's Where is my Friend's Home? (1987). The Argentinian film Las Acacias is the best in this year's crop. I am glad the film got a bit of distribution even if it was very limited. This type of film often makes my undistributed list. I am also glad that The Loneliest Planet was shown theatrically in a few markets. It is clearly no crowd-pleaser as it is too slow (read uneventful) for the average viewer. The film boasts naturalistic perfs by actors and non-actors and great photography but I am left with the feeling that Julia Loktev fails to take full advantage of a very intriguing set of circumstances. The Dardenne Brothers would have found an ending/resolution/denouement that enhances the build-up and resonates with import rather than the somewhat unremarkable closer of TLP."

[Chris Knipp]

When I got a notice yesterday of a post on the Loneliest Planet thread I thought it would be Oscar singing its praises, so now I'm not surprised that he has come along a day later to do so, but also pleased that he has the discernment to see that this film
"failss to take full advantage of a very intriguing set of circumstances."

That's right. You said it, pal. Hemingway has been cited by more than one, though the short story meant, presumably "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short_Happy_Life_of_Francis_Macomber)," goes in the opposite direction, moral courage-wise, that story, one of Hemingway's finest and most well known, is really quite thrilling and shattering, whereas The Loneliest Planet sort of falls with a dull thud. Mayhap Ms. Loktev lives in a more impoverished moral universe to begin with and does not have Hemingway's intense personal experience of what machismo means.

It certainly is a festival film and probably not an "audience pleaser"; more of an audience teaser. To link it with Ackerman and Las Acacias is rather clever; I could not thought of doing so. Of course they use their ordinariness and real time situations in different ways for different purposes, and while I was underwhelmed by Las Acacias, it has a humanness and warmth that The Loneliest Planet never really tries for, of if it does, never achieves.

I can see what you're getting at re: the Dardennes; moral dilemmas and moral failures by men often come up in their films. But I can't really see the Dardennes making something of this setup, because their concerns are so far removed from the dilemmas of rich first world white people on an exotic holiday.


For me the question still remains why the critics, mostly younger (than me, maybe than you), like The Loneliest Planet so much. I'll have to look up and see if Mike D'Angelo wrote a review.

Okay, here's D'Angelo's review (http://letterboxd.com/gemko/film/the-loneliest-planet/1/), from Toronto '11. I see he mentions Certified Copy. I was anticipating him or maybe was remembering him because I must have read this earlier. Actually, it adds nothing that we don't already know. But the comment still remains: "fails to take full advantage," etc. D'Angelo's short enough to quote in toto:


She could've called this one Together Alone Together Alone, though I suppose that would make her project a little too blatant. First half once again slightly numbing (by design), though there's far more tension inherent in this scenario since we have no idea when to hunker down, or even why; it's also pleasurably disarming to witness lovers genuinely enjoying each other's company for such an uninterrupted stretch, even if there are hints (right from that surreal opening shot) of willful obliviousness; to say nothing of what I hereby dub the Trudge Effect, in which characters' movement through a constantly shifting landscape somehow magically forestalls boredom no matter how little is otherwise happening. Then comes the Event, of which I will say nothing save that it was so sudden, quick and utterly unexpected that I truly thought for an instant that I must have seen it wrong, surely that did not just happen? Subsequent non-events confirm that it did, and the film's extraordinary latter half depicts in minute and amazingly credible detail both the singular horror of being trapped in close quarters with someone you love but can't for the moment bear to be near (happened to me on a cross-country flight once) and the heroic, quixotic attempt of both parties to forgive the unforgivable. Much like Certified Copy, it condenses years of a relationship into a single day, using radical bifurcation rather than elegant gamesmanship to leap chasms of time (and avoiding the single pitfall of Kiarostami's film by never even once addressing the heart of the matter via dialogue -- you've never been so torn up by the request for a verb to conjugate). Is there a more exciting newish (I don't count Moment of Impact) voice than Loktev right now? Promise confirmed is as sweet as this gig gets.

I'll see if I can find something a bit more profound or original. "Exciting voice"? Well I have not seen her previous work. I go with Roger Ebert's remarks, "We're given no particular reason at the outset of The Loneliest Planet to care about these people," and this is key. In contrast Hemingway's story shows us that the couple have serious issues, and that is why we care when something significant happens that changes the balance totally. A lot hinges on being able to show us that the people matter. I'd say that marginally in Las Acacias they do matter. How can you discount a cute baby and a lonely guy? When Lisa Schwartzbaum enthusiastically describes the TLP pair thus: "Alex (Gael García Bernal, subtle and deep) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg, shimmering with delicate strength à la Jessica Chastain, in a great breakthrough performance)" I wonder what movie she was watching. I never cared about either of them.

[tabuno]

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 or involving connections, people speaking a foreign language with no subtitles and little audience understanding, and finally a couple frolicking. The movie has no direction, no motivating purpose, nothing interesting occurring in this movie that the audience likely hasn’t experienced for themselves in real life. The full nude female opening shot was just confusing and odd. Later sex scenes lacked 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 is shot in an uninteresting, lazy homemade video format. It doesn’t take time for the audience to care for these characters, who seem just like any flippant Americans, superficial without really any depth. While they aren’t stereotypical at all, they appear to be empty shells of humanity. The audience experiences an extended scene of the back of the girl’s red curvaceous hair flopping around (which again occurs 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 distancing the audience from the perspective of the characters themselves, suggesting the audience really isn’t as important as the characters and literally being given the backseat. There’s a brief forgettable scene of animal petting where one is reminded of an intense and riveting animal petting scene in Manhunter (1986) using a sound track that provokes shivers, fear, tenderness and a surreal off-balance experience unique to murder mystery thrillers. There’s the crossing the stream scene, the prerequisite slip, but one is reminded of the three boys crossing a bridge along a train track that had intensity and emotional uncertainty, lending itself to the movie in Stand By Me (1986). There’s the overly long vastness of the 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. There’s the climbing over precarious rock scene where one is reminded of the much more intimate and compelling survival scene of crawling over the rocks from Touching The Void (2003). These only further diminish the role and interest of the characters without purpose and one 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 director uses a number of long slow shots with minimal action, yet unlike the Lost in Translation or Melancholia (2011) they possess a meaningful enveloping context for audience connecting them to deeper emotions derived from passive setting and details. Even the brief mundane scene of the guide tumbling a rock down a hill is another missed opportunity, better shot again in the first perspective or even better yet from the rocks vantage point, again the audience is not allowed to experience what the characters saw, further distancing the audience like the rock tumbling out of view and out of mind. The director or script writer throws in the brief something caught in my eye scene, as if such unusual phenomenon is supposed to inject interest. Why not a poisonous insect bite, a fall from jumping a rock scene, food poisoning from eating strange food or plants more in keeping with the movie’s location? The movie contains mostly unintelligible tourists guide stories making one want to pay for a real bus tour of any city that would likely be much more interesting and worth the ticket price. The audience is subjected pretentiously to a balancing on one’s head competition, rope tricks, and guessing games, and an extended boring, monotonous Spanish verb form lesson…who cares? The brief footsie scene brings to mind a much more intense and motivating scene of Uma Thurman’s toes in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) or the brief reading from a book scene reminds one of the more involved and ethereal use of reading by Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999). There’s the overly dark (poorly lit) campfire scene that includes a supposedly interesting shock value but really another inane pee scene that brings to mind the more riveting and starkly break out film of the reality-simulated cinematography of the eerie darkened The Blair Witch Project (1999).
Near the halfway point of the movie the supposedly big incident arises involving a direct threat of harm to our couple that was rather predictable and lacked suspense. It was diminished by the exclusive focus on the man instead of the stranger threatening him. The audience instead is left witnessing with a overly long sterile shot of a barrel of a rifle. The resultant girl’s emotions and fear that have been completely obviated by her being hidden behind the man taking the audience further taken away from the scene, a confusing manipulated scripted exercise in futility. Also the scene wasn’t really set up well where some ominous reasonable portents could easily been incorporated earlier in the movie. The reaction of the girl is also suspect where the boyfriend risked his own life. The resulting scene is a jumble of detachment of the part of scriptwriter whose outcome is severely blunted in impact and believability leaving the audience in the dark and detached from most pivotal scene of the movie. 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 out towards the audience connecting with them a deeply human and empathic experience. Instead this movie has the continuous, inconsequential walking scenes with no variety, no interesting shift in characterization or action, no diverting drama…just a continuing almost literal plodding storyline as if this sustained, continuous photographic technique were somehow special and of cinematic importance ( but only in the mind of the director). At some point movie seems to move on inertia without the director the characters simply improvising, as if they themselves aren’t aware of what to do except to move and walk, oblivious that this is really a movie. The movie goes from plodding to torturously painful as the audience is forced to watch along with the characters for some unimaginable reason a large amount of water spraying out profusely from a pipe. Later a dripping water scene also helps to remind one of the amazing and psychological torturously delicious “auditory” scene filmed and composed 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 and would have been consistently edited together with the characters initial wonder and exploratory interest on their beginning journey of discovery. But its placement here only detracts from the more important psychological focus of the characters themselves relegating this fascinating geological feature to more of an afterthought, just like the audience. Later the audience sees a wide shot of the girl now close to the tourist guide, the person who was supposedly familiar with the land and its people who allowed them to experience the barrel of the rifle and possible death as if life were normal, the tourist guide who did not lend a hand until long moments went by while it was the man who put himself directly in harm’s way. The movie appears to have entered an alternative universe, much farther away then any semblance of authentic, engaging reality.
Then there is inexplicable the sudden rain scene, hands holding up a flimsy plastic tarp even though there nearby branch limbs that could hold up the tarp. Then later a confusing sequence where the man leaves the makeshift plastic tent then the back of a person wearing a yellow poncho without knowing who it is, until it is revealed that it is girl wearing the poncho, with omission of any emotional facial shot of the girl’s state of mind. Further more, it also seems more reasonable to have had one person just wear the poncho in the first place instead having to attempt to so strenuously hold manually a plastic tarp to cover them all. These character can only revert back to a recitation of Spanish verb forms as they pass over, on top of, and through a small rough snow field. Again the director missed using this interesting snow feature as part of the fun, exploratory beginning voyage of the movie, where the couple could be playfully sliding down the hill, snow so effectively integrated as an essential prop in Touching The Void.
The trio encounters a rather incongruous small stream crossing segment which they should have already crossed earlier, that includes the expectant spill but shown off screen without any of the suspense of drama leaving the audience overlooked, left by the wayside as passive bystanders missing out on the most compelling and pertinent physical elements of the movie. Still later, the girl somehow throws off her resentment being the brunt of a threat by a rifle and the one to have the mishap at the stream. The audience is subjected to more inane cat singing cat jokes by the girl around a darkened campfire which reveals for the first time a big ugly gaping space between her two upper front teeth detracting from the scene. This scene just seems designed to be oddly cute and dramatic with the now oddly morose, quiet boyfriend with an oblivious girlfriend. There a cutaway to a brief scene of the boyfriend in a tent who then oddly covers his eyes even though it’s almost as dark as possible. It would have made more sense to perhaps attempt to cover his ears. The movie then cuts back to the campfire which for a few seconds it’s not possible to realize what is being seen because it’s a different angle and lighting from the earlier shot that is off-putting and unnecessarily disorienting. Over an hour and a half into the movie finally a little background of these characters are revealed, something that would more likely have been already talked about many other evenings earlier. Strangely and sadly enough, the tourist guide’s own brief narrative 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 become 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, un-dramatic, uninteresting, and boring films produced, directed by a person who believes she’s good but isn’t. The final scenes are 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.

[Chris Knipp]

Some of your references to other films are really useful, beginning with Lost in Translation's use of a foreign language.

"Lazy homemade video format." Well not exactly; they had an expensive camera, I'm sure. But you make me wonder: how much is this film subtle, and how much is it just in fact lazy? Interesting the way you find a better scene in another movie corresponding to a string of moments.

They got me thinking and I came up with a comparison of my own: Maren Ade's Everyone Else (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1204773/), also a vacation film about a young (German) couple whose relationship gradually goes wrong, which also uses space and movement but makes us care and derives much specific emotional detail through dialogue. I reviewed Everyone Else (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2644-New-York-Film-Festival-2009&postid=23022#post23022) on this site as part of the NYFF of 2009. Ade defines the relationship between the young heterosexual couple as a power struggle in which roles are not very clearly defined. Not everyone liked this film, Everyone Else, and I think in particular some men hated it, but in contrast to The Loneliest Planet it examines a relationship under a magnifying glass and captures many nuances. It too is long, in fact longer, and in my review I commented that Ade needed to spend more time in the cutting room. Many viewers would agree Everyone Else needed editing in the second half, though its quotidian real-time quality (a quality in Loneliest Planet etc. which Oscar alluded to) in enhanced by that very length. This has been compared to Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage and Ade herself said she looked at that in preparation. Just some thoughts. The Variety reviewer, Derek Elley, disliked (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117939624/?refCatId=31) Everyone Else as much as you and I dislike The Loneliest Planet: but in that case I don't agree with him (nor did the Hollywood Reporter reviewer, who loved it), even though I could predict that some would call Everyone Else the most boring movie they'd ever seen. But they are the people who say that every time they see a somewhat complex festival film. The question is, when are those people right? Aren't they right sometimes?

In the crucial scene of The Loneliest Planet, what is it that happens exactly, how well or badly is it shot, how much of the shots are intentional and what do they mean? I am not clear on that and would have to get the DVD and go over that. But to be honest, I'd rather watch Scenes from a Marriage. I did just watch it and liked it so much I thought of getting the complete long TV miniseries version, but then I decided I should stop while I was ahead. I'm watching a lot of Bergman after having watched a bunch of Bunuel. If I were in NYC this time of year over Christmas and New Years, I'd probably have movies to see in theaters every day but not here. I just rewatched Rust and Bone with a friend in San Francisco. I'm waiting for The Impossible (my doubts now on that are in my 2012 Movies List) and Zero Dark Thirty, the big one that got away because it's held back from here till January; they both are.