Loneliness And Landscapes

“Travel time is such a special time,” says Julia Loktev, the filmmaker behind the magical, minimalist The Loneliest Planet, a phenomenological travelogue set against the biological splendour of Georgia's Caucasus Mountains. “You don't have a list of a hundred things you're supposed to be doing that day, you're just there; just being, and drifting. It's almost like a dream time.”

Born in St Petersburg, Russia, and raised in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, Loktev's childhood blessed her with a love of both mountains and wandering. “I love travelling,” coos the 43-year-old. “When I finished college, I spent five months travelling on my own through Central Asia, and that's not something many Americans do.” When Loktev was at the Tbilisi Film Festival with her provocative narrative debut, 2006's Day Night Day Night, she remembered reading a short story by Tom Bissell called Expensive Trips Nowhere, in which a couple breaks up on holiday in Kazakhstan. Loktev, in turn, met up with her boyfriend, who'd been bicycling across Georgia and Armenia, and then they broke up in the Caucasus. So, she set about loosely adapting Bissell's story to screen; wanting to explore “how it feels to be in that space of backpacking: away from home, out of your element, but with that person you love, and how much you lean on them, and how it feels for that relationship to be tested. How it feels when, suddenly, this thing happens between you that rocks your world”. The 'thing' that happens in The Loneliest Planet – shouldn't be disclosed; especially given Loktev is proud to have made a film that “doesn't tell you what to think”. Yet it's so fleeting, so seemingly minor (when I saw the film, people in the audience laughed), that it's hard to believe a film has been based around it. “The essential moment takes two seconds, but the emotional reverberations could last a lifetime,” Loktev says. “It's about how a single incident can shake a relationship to its core.”

The emotional reverberations that resound from it – in the central relationship between Mexican heart-throb Gael García Bernal and Israeli actress Hani Furstenberg, and in their relationship to their local guide, Bidzina Gujabidze (an actual local Georgian guide) – play out largely in silence; these tiny figures isolated in vast landscapes. “I was more interested in what happens when you don't talk about things,” says Loktev. “We're so used to, in movies, where people sit down and say everything they're feeling and everything they want. When, in real life, that never happens. Very often, you don't know what to say.” The production of The Loneliest Planet involved the crew 'living the film': staying in local guesthouses with families, lead up various mountains by local guides, endlessly traipsing with gear strapped to their backs. The result is a film as alive to its landscape as any in the history of cinema. “I've never had such an appreciation for the power of the sun, the power of nature, for every nuance of light,” says Loktev. “Much of the day we could not film because the sun was too strong, the light was too harsh. So, we had to adapt ourselves to light and find moments where the sun was beautiful, and take advantage of what nature was giving us.”