REVIEW: The Loneliest Planet, One Of The Year?s Finest

Compact and athletic in their identical cargo pants, Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg) are almost the same size, a pair of well-traveled pixies making their way through Georgia (the country, not the state). They're engaged to be married, but in the meantime they're backpacking, a journey that, when The Loneliest Planet begins, is about to take them into the Caucasus Mountains on a multi-day hike for which they've hired a guide named Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze). They look so happy and free, Nica and Alex, trying out the few phrases of Georgian they've picked up and partaking of local street food after a minor investigation as to what kind of meat it involves. They're the opposite of ugly Americans (Alex might not actually be American at all), ready to try anything and quietly confident that they'll be welcomed, that the world is meant to be explored.

The third film from Julia Loktev (Day Night Day Night) and, by this critic's reckoning, one of the finest of the year, The Loneliest Planet is based on a short story by Tom Bissell that's itself inspired by a famous Hemingway work, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. That earliest incarnation of this narrative is about a wealthy couple on a hunting trip in Africa lead by a professional guide, the wife a beautiful, emasculating figure who punishes her husband for a recent display of cowardice out in the bush. Bissell offered up a less toxic, contemporized take on the characters, but Loktev's version is something else again, a profoundly cinematic exploration of the way a single incident completely unsettles the way this man and woman think of each other and themselves.

The Loneliest Planet is primarily a three-person drama, and its eventual deep emotional turmoil and the power shifts that come with…

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