LAFF ‘09 Review: Turistas

Turistas – Chile 2008
Written and directed by Alicia Scherson. Starring Aline Küppenheim, Diego Noguera, Marcelo Alonso and Viviana Herr

Narrative Competition – US Premiere

It would’ve been nice to kick off the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival with a big exciting bang, but Turistas isn’t exactly that film. It’s more like the pretty but shy and unassuming girl at the boisterous party. She doesn’t seem like much at first, but when you get her in conversation, she reveals a depth of thoughtfulness and a quiet humor that you find yourself thinking about well into the next day.

This is Chilean filmmaker Alicia Scherson’s follow up to her award-winning (Karlovy Vary, Montreal and Tribeca) debut feature Play. Aline Küppenheim who had a part in Scherson’s debut here plays Carla, a woman abandoned by her husband en route to a holiday in the country after she reveals a shocking bit of news to him about her pregnancy.

While hitchhiking back to civilization, she meets an odd young Norwegian backpacker named Ulrik who is taking refuge from the city. Before long, a few days camping in a national park sounds like a better idea than returning to her home in Santiago. At 37 years old, she’s at one of life’s crossroads and some time spent in nature might be just the thing she needs to get straightened out.

Over the next few days, she happens upon several strange but interesting characters, none of whom are exactly as they seem when she first meets them. She has plenty of time to reflect on her situation, but all the while her old life seems to loom over her in the distant sounds of a highway being built. It’s a bit of civilization encroaching upon the natural paradise she’s discovered for herself.

In a way, Carla and Ulrik are a bit like Charlotte and Bob in Lost in Translation. One approaching middle age and the other just getting started, they’re both going through a transitional phase. Though the setting is a national park instead of a bustling foreign city, the awkwardness and imbalance from being out of their ordinary environment opens them up to an intense if not quite romantic relationship and leaves them receptive to big life changes.

Though not as visually luscious, Turistas shares with Sofia Coppola’s film a hazy, dreamlike quality, at times even following a sort of dream logic. Comparing one movie to another however is always a dangerous business, and Turistas is definitely its own film. Where Translation ends with a bracing sense of reality restored, Scherson ends her film on a note that makes you go back and question whether everything you’ve just seen should be taken at face value.

While Turistas is almost a wisp of a story that doesn’t call a lot of attention to itself, it has a beguiling ruminative quality leavened by a subtle, twinkling humor. In the moment it seems dangerously slight, but the spell it casts sticks with you and leaves you thinking about it long afterward.

Filed under: Film Festivals, Reviews
Tags: Alicia Scherson, Aline Küppenheim, Diego Noguera, LAFF, Los Angeles Film Festival, Marcelo Alonso, Touristas, Viviana Herr