A Distant Place (Jose Ramon Novoa, 2010): Venezuala

Reviewed by Mathew Roscoe. Viewed at the Metro IV Theater, part of the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

So far, every film I have seen at this lovely festival has been either an inspired, engaging experience or an entertaining, enjoyable adventure. As I have watched each film, I have always heard consistent and widespread laughter or other appropriate reactions, and the films have always ended with a strong applause. However, for the first time, I have attended a film that gave the audience almost nothing, A Distant Place. When I looked around me during the course of the movie, members of the audience were falling asleep, checking their watches, or just gazing into the screen with a most unpleasant demeanor. And as the film finally faded to black and entered the credits I heard, for the first time, dead silence. And it wasn’t the silence of those who were moved or overwhelmed by emotions. It was the silence of pure emptiness, of a growing regret of sitting down to see this tragic missed opportunity of a film.

What is tragic is that director Jose Ramon Novoa had a very compelling story to work with. The plot is relatively simple and thin, but it had potential to be something truly beautiful. It begins with renowned photographer Julian (Erich Wildpret) dealing with his life after being recently diagnosed with lung cancer. His days are numbered and it only gets worse as his condition intensifies and his wife leaves him. Inspiration comes when he dreams of a beautiful photo he has never taken, and he decides to make it his final mission to find this location and take that photo. His journey leads him to the snowy mountains near Manchuria, where he catches pneumonia and is taken in by a beautiful female mountain farmer. As she nurses him back to health, he falls for her and the two spend many nights together before Spring comes and the snow has melted enough for them to find this place Julian has been looking for.

It’s an inspiring concept: a man’s final journey to create his greatest work of art before he dies. Sadly, the delivery and execution of this film fails to even scratch the surface of what this concept was capable of. The early scenes of Julian consist of almost every dreary, pretentious independent movie cliché: Man stares into mirror whilst flashbacks of better times play, man leans back against wall whilst often pointless voiceovers play. Even his journey gets off at a very uninteresting, uninspiring start.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy is the failed delivery of the movie’s biggest plot point: Julian’s new romance with the mountain woman. What could have been a beautiful character arc ends up misfiring at just about every point. The initiating kiss between the two is very awkward and stale, but not in a cute or compelling way, such as the famously awkward kiss in The Graduate(1969). Even more disappointing than the first kiss are all of the intimacy and love scenes, mainly the scene where they shower together and what we are to assume is a love-making scene. The main issue is that both of these key scenes are far too short and abruptly end before they can even get close to accomplishing their purpose. This supposedly significant scenes can’t be compelling or romantically inspiring or even really go anywhere when they end as soon as they begin, and as it suddenly cuts to the next day or scene, the audience is left asking “…that’’s it?” A crucial part of love scenes are the way they escalate, both on levels of intimacy and emotion, but these scenes hardly even escalate, and the sense of intimacy and of Julian’s sexual re-awakening is complexly lost when the director seems too sheepish to ever go beyond basic kissing.

While Julian’s traveling does not take him across nearly as many locations as one would hope from hearing the premise, the snowy mountains and plains his journey is limited to are indeed beautiful. While Oscar Perez’s cinematography is generally unremarkable with the staging of dialogue scenes, his work shines when his task to capture how small Julian is in these vast, sprawling environments. Unfortunately, the impressive shots of the endless plains are about the limit of this film’s visual appeal. For a movie about a guy who takes pictures of things, the movie is shockingly lacking in beautiful imagery. When Julian is in an attractive environment, their beauty and small details are never savored or explored, making it seem like the director doesn’t understand the whole point of photography, capturing the beauty of the moment. And when the movie utterly fails to capture the feeling and magic of the main character’s profession and journey, the audience is lost and never gains any attachment to it.

Hopefully, one day, another filmmaker can get a hold of this story and do it justice.