The Loneliest Planet

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Movie Details

• Genre: Suspense/Thriller
• Release Date: 2012-10-19 NY
• Running Time: 113 min.
• Director: Julia Loktev
• Cast: Hani Furstenberg, Gael Garcoa Bernal, Bidzina Gujabidze
• Producers: Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Helge Albers, Marie-Thero¨se Guirgis
• Writer: Julia Loktev
• Distributor: IFC Films
• Official Site: The Loneliest Planet Official Site

The Loneliest Planet begins with close-up shot of a beautiful woman, naked and trembling. It's not what it sounds like. Nica (Hani Furstenberg), on a pre-marriage honeymoon with fiancé Alex (Gael García Bernal) in rural Georgia, is in the midst of a makeshift shower. As Nica pogoes up and down to keep warm, her slim, androgynous body, doused in milky white soap suds, becomes a blur of motion. It takes a moment for the eyes to adjust, to register what we’re seeing: Is this body male or female? Is this a mundane act or some strange, exotic ritual? With this, writer-director Julia Loktev sets up her extraordinary second fiction feature: She announces an intention to explore sex and gender murkiness, and warns that this is a film that demands distraction-free contemplation. Loktev takes a painterly approach, crafting a study in colors--the vibrant green landscape, entire campfire-lit scenes registering as dances of shadow and warm flashes of skin--as she also charts the variable shades and tones of a single relationship. Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil. In a good relationship, you feel like you can survive anything the world throws at you. Loktev expertly trains her camera through a fissure in such a bond and reveals an unshakable vision of the terror of facing the unknown without a guide.