57,000 Kilometers Between Us

(57,000 km entre nous)

Directed By Delphine Kreuter

Review By Marleah Martin

A14-year-old girl hides out in her room and finds solace in two online flirtations. One is with an adult baby, the other with a teenage boy dying in seclusion. She feels more of a bond with her biological father, now a transsexual, than with the rest of her family, who are compulsively filmed by her stepfather for his video blog.

“Well”, I thought, “this should be interesting”. The unconventional family ties seemed intriguing, as did the exploration of online vs. face-to-face communication. Here was a great framework to take a look at the humorous and poignant sides of human relationships as they are affected by modern technology. Granted, there was plenty of unconventionality laid out from the start, but this only seemed to affirm that the approach would be one that would gracefully cut straight to the heart of these connections. Unfortunately, from the very beginning, it was rather apparent that was not to be the case.

In comedy improv, there’s a term called “piling on the crazy”. Instead of finding one or two interesting points about their characters and building on them, in an attempt to entertain, the performers just keep pulling the wildest things from their imagination they can think of and slapping them on the scene, to the point where no one can follow, including the performers themselves. The audience has lost interest because with no central idea, they have no clue what the hell is going on and have lost confidence in performers who just don’t look to be in the driver's seat anymore.

I was reminded of this comedic misstep in the opening scene when the family is on their way to visit Grandma. The second they’re out of the car, Dad’s taping. Ok, that’s pretty amusing. Mom’s got the composed exterior with the mess of stress just under the surface, contrasted by her teenage daughter’s blasé, snarky attitude. Two distinct ingredients that will surely add a kick to the recipe. The younger children- often busying themselves with noisy, flashing, electronic toys- seem oblivious to the strange family dynamic they’re smack in the middle of. So far, that adds up to plenty of peculiarities.  And a good setup, likely followed by the equilibrium of firmly planting the action for a bit, so we may take a close, hard look at these relationships…yes? Not so fast.

Enter Grandma- a vivacious septuagenarian showgirl (really) wearing a Vegas-style spangled number, who treats the family to a little soft-shoe upon their entrance. It’s cute and campy but this, plus Dad’s taping, plus the quirks of the kids, starts to make the scene somewhat overwhelming.  But there’s more! Grandma also lives in an unattractive, barren housing development that’s still under construction (it has no pizzazz- totally not where you’d expect a flashy dame like her to be- get it?). She discourages anyone from sitting on any of the few pieces of furniture she has. And she barely disguises her preference towards her daughter’s ex-husband. And so on and so forth. The kicker is that as we watch Grandma speak loudly with her big schtick and Dad do his wacky thing and the kids do their wacky thing, additionally we’re treated to fast cuts, blasts of high saturation color, and a camera that, of course, jerks and wobbles all over the place as the clan picnics in the vivid (here comes the irresistible film nerd joke) “green grass”. Presumably, this was to ensure that the “Cah-RAZY!” factor didn’t go over our heads, but in doing so, we’re repeatedly hit over the head. Seeing as that was just the first 10 minutes, naturally I was apprehensive that if the next 72 didn’t tone it down some, by the end I’d be walking out with a headache.

These concerns were soon confirmed; a crazy-quilt patched together with screwy plot points, the piece becomes increasingly dizzying.  Tell me the intent is to disorient, but in reality, this is not an amusement park ride, this is a film; can we really be expected to be spun through candy-colored bizarro episode after episode for this long of a stretch, and still be expected to have any amount of investment in the characters when we hardly have a second to really focus on who they are? That freaky-deaky quality hurts more than it helps, making the film come across as either utterly directionless or that the majority of the sequences featuring this motley bunch of maladjusted malcontents was orchestrated by some human-loathing mad clown. Because often, not only is aimlessness the name of the game, but it's their deplorable traits that are highlighted rather than their honorable ones, their eccentricities rather than their humanity. And that leaves us little to root for.

It’s a shame, because the choice completely overshadows some really beautiful, simpler moments that give us a glimpse into the characters’ true inner lives. Regrettably, when those true selves are briefly revealed and the camera just sits still for a couple minutes, it’s still tough for an addled brain to switch gears and really have much empathy for people who have for the most part proven to be pretty dodgy.

What's more, though the heartfelt performances of Stéphanie Michelini and Hadrien Bouvier are superb, in playing the stereotypically weirdest of the weirdos (those least able to hide who they are from the world- the transsexual and the terminally ill boy, respectively), their time onscreen is subjected to the predictable choice of making them the ones with the most respectability. It’s an ironically safe, p.c. choice for a film that appears to play fast and loose with the rules the rest of the time. And yet, this was one instance where it perhaps would have been better to not settle on the expected route and instead, seize our attention by shaping these two with more subtle complexity and ambiguity with respect to their virtue.

Were it to trim off the superfluity, giving us more time to identify with and appreciate the onscreen relationships, 27,000 km would hold greater appeal. Random and weird just for its own sake comes off as trying too hard, like an adolescent-like attempt at self-definition. Points for the film’s imagination and exercises in creativity, but with too many of those 82 minutes being filled with “piling on the crazy” – rather than entertain more and more, it just makes for a cinematic experience that requires a good deal of patience to sit through.