'Viaje' follows two young Costa Ricans, Pedro (Fernando Bolaños, who has a fine head of hair) and Luciana (co-producer Kattia González, who looks disconcertingly like British actor Rupert Graves) on the first faltering steps of romance. The pair meet at a costume party and the drunk Luciana is taken by the equally-intoxicated Pedro's juvenile sense of humour. The next morning she decides to accompany him on his research trip to the forest. But there's a problem: Luciana has a 'plane to catch, to join her boyfriend in London...
As the pair spend their precious couple of days together, the film follows their relationship from drunken fumbles to something that could go deeper. Neither young lover is flawless - in real life Pedro's juvenile sense of humour would get especially tiresome after a very short while, and Luciana is, after all, playing around behind her boyfriend's back. But in the main they're both so likable that you can't help hoping they'll stay together. In what is essentially a two-character film, both leads cope well with the lengthy conversations they have to act out - conversations scripted well enough that they flow nicely even when inconsequential (rather than sounding ad-libbed or workshopped, methods supposed to deliver realistic-sounding dialogue but which usually fails in that aim as the actors wonder how to end the scene).
The film's major flaw, for me, is it being filmed in black-and-white. Apart from an attempt to gain extra filmsnob points there seems no good reason for it, and it means that the viewer doesn't get the full benefit of what could be spectacular forest scenery. Few films come out of Costa Rica, so it seems a shame to waste the opportunity to show off the country's natural splendours.
As the pair spend their precious couple of days together, the film follows their relationship from drunken fumbles to something that could go deeper. Neither young lover is flawless - in real life Pedro's juvenile sense of humour would get especially tiresome after a very short while, and Luciana is, after all, playing around behind her boyfriend's back. But in the main they're both so likable that you can't help hoping they'll stay together. In what is essentially a two-character film, both leads cope well with the lengthy conversations they have to act out - conversations scripted well enough that they flow nicely even when inconsequential (rather than sounding ad-libbed or workshopped, methods supposed to deliver realistic-sounding dialogue but which usually fails in that aim as the actors wonder how to end the scene).
The film's major flaw, for me, is it being filmed in black-and-white. Apart from an attempt to gain extra filmsnob points there seems no good reason for it, and it means that the viewer doesn't get the full benefit of what could be spectacular forest scenery. Few films come out of Costa Rica, so it seems a shame to waste the opportunity to show off the country's natural splendours.
