"10,000 km/ Long Distance"

Carlos Marques-Marcet’s debut is a take on the trials of long distance love which won five awards at Spain’s recent Malaga festival.

A well-crafted, tightly controlled and emotionally probing X-ray of the attempts of one couple to use tech to keep their relationship alive across a continent and an ocean, Long Distance is a satisfyingly solid example of form and content working together. It teems with wonderful ideas about the relationship between love and technology that have probably at some point flashed through the minds of social media users – how can you be the “friend” of someone you’ve never met? – whilst revealing how though tech can support us in our illusions, it can also brutally expose them.

 

The opening shot seems like an opportunity for D.P. Dagmar Weaver-Madsen to show us what she can do before she hands over to Skype. It’s a superbly-controlled and choreographed 23-minute record of intimacy, shot inside a Barcelona apartment in which a couple – photographer Alex (the bilingual Natalia Tena, Harry Potter’s Nymphadora Tonks and Osha in Game of Thrones) and student Sergi (David Verdaguer) slowly and intensely make love (they’re trying for a baby) and play around before she reveals that she’s been offered a year-long residency in L.A. It’s a similar prospect to that faced by many young Spaniards today, in the harsh economic climate: do I stay, and put my relationships before my professional future, or do I go?Its Malaga awards and SXSW screenings should open the way to festival and arthouse screenings for this first feature by Lastor Media and Carlos Marques-Marcet, one of La Panda, a collective of Spanish film makers who have relocated to LA and who, it’s probably fair to say, know what they’re talking about when it comes to leaving home.

Already, as Alex admits that she’s known about the offer without telling David, the first crack has started to appear. David is studying for state exams, which Spanish viewers will realize makes him the kind of person who’s opted for an easy, stable life rather than for adventure, but Alex is restless, seeing no future for herself in Spain. She leaves, and for a while, things are just fine as she uses a range of software – mainly Skype and Google Maps -- to show David her new life in Silver Lake and to prevent herself from feeling lonely.

He amusingly teaches her to cook a meal for her new guests, and there’s even a little tragi-comically awkward sex play: however close technology can bring people on opposite sides of the world, Long Distance insists, it can’t bring us that close, no matter how good your Internet connection is (luckily for the film, the Internet connection between these two works surprisingly well.)

    

Apart from it’s opening and closing sequences structured as a partial diary record -- “Day 1”, “Day 16” etc. roll by seamlessly thanks to the precision-tooled editing -- Long Distance is a sharp critique of the powers and limitations of technology. Designed to bring people closer – it’s even possible that without the existence of Skype, Alex would either not have left David at all or forgotten about him sooner – technology is forensically revealed as a phenomenon that can indeed bring people together at the informational level, but can be no substitute for their physical presence.

“We didn’t have the obligation to talk before,” David complains, and in doing so he’s indirectly commenting on technology, which causes so much of a relationship to go missing. Indeed, the technology, rather than bringing the lovers closer, drives them apart, with Alex for the first time able to observe her boyfriend from a distance and to gauge what he’s really like. She doesn’t too much like what she sees.

Tena shared the best actress award at Malaga for a soul-bearing performance as Alex, whose sufferings are painfully natural and nuanced, aided by dialogue that some viewers will find joltingly familiar from their own experience.

“Can we talk about something that isn’t our relationship?” she irritably asks David at one point, and the viewer starts to ask the same question. Alex’s move has given her a life outside the relationship, while David stays locked into his, and essentially he doesn’t change from first frame to last. David is very good looking but not particularly appealing, and at one point there’s a touch of the psychopath about him. (One scene sets him up to destroy his computer, though naturally he can’t quite go that far.) But the bigger issue is that David is too emotionally limited to sustain interest through the whole running time.

The film’s use of multiple screens is sometimes telling, sometimes nicely ambiguous. When for example David’s Skyped face is plastered over with images of Alex’s photos because she’s looking at them as she chats to him, there’s already a sense that the writing is on the wall. A hand crosses over moment of beach footage of Alex: whose hand is this? Is Alex having an affair? And as David leafs morosely through an old photograph album, there is the sense that he’s been left behind not only by his cutting-edge, image-driven photographer partner, but by a new world of tech which has outstripped him.

Production: Lastor Media, La Panda

Cast: Natalia Tena, David Verdaguer

Director: Carlos Marques-Marcet

Screenwriter: Marques-Marcet, Clara Roquet

Producers: Tono Folguera, Sergi Moreno, Jana Diaz Juhl

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Technology at once helps and hinders the connection between two far-apart lovers in this sensitive, moving drama.

The central paradox of so much recent technology — why do devices meant to enable human communication wind up hindering it? — is sensitively and movingly explored within the context of a thoroughly modern relationship in “Long Distance.” With the exception of two lengthy bookend sequences, this beautifully acted love story — about an artist who moves to Los Angeles for a year, leaving behind her boyfriend in Barcelona — is mediated entirely through video-chat sessions, text messages, Facebook updates and the occasional phone call, offering a resonant contempo angle on the age-old dilemma of lovers separated by geography and by their own dreams and desires. A rigorously controlled two-hander that never feels airless or minimalist, Carlos Marques-Marcet’s bittersweet debut feature is a natural for further fest play and international arthouse exposure.

Spanish multihyphenate Marques-Marcet has numerous editing credits and a handful of shorts to his name, and in “Long Distance,” the sense of a filmmaker who knows exactly what he’s doing is evident from the first frame — an image of two attractive thirtysomethings, Alex (Natalia Tena) and Sergi (David Verdaguer), making love in their cramped Barcelona apartment. The sex is over in due course but the shot keeps going, lasting an extraordinary 18 minutes total; the camera follows the characters from room to room in neatly choreographed movements, establishing an intimacy that stems as much from its silent observation of their morning rituals — brushing teeth, getting dressed, eating breakfast — as it does from all the dreamy pillow talk and casual nudity.

That intimacy will soon slip away, as becomes clear when Alex checks her email and finds out she’s been offered a fully paid yearlong artist’s residency in Los Angeles — and, after some weighing of pros and cons, they decide to give the long-distance thing a try. This means postponing their decision to start a family, to Sergi’s initial disappointment, although Alex, who moved from the U.K. to Barcelona to be with him, isn’t quite so ready to be tied down. Cut to black: In the next scene (“Day 1″), Alex has arrived in L.A., where she gives Sergi a virtual tour of her small studio apartment in Silver Lake. Just a few moments later, it’s Day 16, and Alex and Sergi are lying in their respective beds, communing affectionately through their laptop screens.

By Day 59, Alex still hasn’t fully adjusted to her new surroundings, and Sergi encourages her to go outside and embrace whatever adventures L.A. has to offer. And so she does: Within a few weeks, she’s making new friends, taking salsa lessons and finding artistic inspiration in her photography of a city she’s slowly learning to love. The world seems full of excitement and possibility — but not for Sergi, who finds himself an increasingly marginal presence in his girlfriend’s life. Her Facebook profile is a puzzle of new faces and unfamiliar references; her texts and phone calls become more and more erratic. Sergi is jealous of the fulfillment she seems to have discovered without him, and frustrated by the fact that his own life has stalled in the meantime.

From first frame to last, the filmmaking exudes intelligence and control, with none of the chilly emotional distance those qualities can imply. Form and content are in near-perfect balance: That remarkable opening sequence, with its seamless flow and visual continuity, emphasizes the characters’ harmony and connectedness; the rest of the picture, consisting of short, quick exchanges taking place across two continents, is all about disruption and separation. These formal strategies are also reflected in the cinematography, as d.p. Dagmar Weaver-Madsen’s exquisite interior lensing frequently gives way to low-grade Skype footage, as well as by the editing, as the traditional pattern of shot-reverse-shot further serves to underscore the growing distance between the two characters.

While it’s become fairly common for a movie to show characters sending emails and text messages, or using Facebook and Google Maps (which gets a particularly extended cameo here), this one has a particularly versatile understanding of how ordinary couples use the technology at their disposal. There’s an amusing scene early on when Alex makes a valiant stab at cooking dinner for friends, with Sergi directing and mocking her every move from the laptop screen; later, the film quite candidly addresses the awkward pleasures of cybersex, in a scene that manages to be funny, tender and erotic all at once. But the key achievement of “Long Distance,” apart from the extraordinary subtlety with which it orchestrates the gradual breakdown of a loving, long-term union, is that it reveals how our phones and computers can actually leave us feeling more isolated than we might have otherwise.

As the picture progresses, bringing Alex and Sergi’s relationship through its painful stages to a hopeful yet ambiguous moment of reckoning, it becomes clear that Marques-Marcet (who wrote the script with Clara Roquet) is operating by a careful set of ground rules. Alex and Sergi will be the only characters we see or spend time with, and the action will be confined entirely to their respective apartments; other locations and people will be glimpsed only in photographs. Some audiences may well object to the dramatic limitations of such a method, arguing that to view characters in such isolation — particularly Sergi, a handsome, likable guy who doesn’t seem to have too many friends — can only yield a partial view of the story.

But for those who don’t mind — indeed, who freely accept — that a movie can only ever offer a partial view, the emotional immediacy and understated insight of “Long Distance” are strong enough to belie the film’s modest origins. Skillful as Marques-Marcet’s aesthetic choices are, they wouldn’t be half as effective without two such well-matched performances: Darkly handsome Verdaguer breaks down the Latin lover stereotype to reveal the needy, wounded man beneath, while fair-skinned beauty Tena makes a virtue of her character’s indecision, doing justice to Alex’s guilt as well as her joy. In a film so perceptive about the difficulties of human interaction in the modern era, this is acting that never fails to hold the viewer close.