One of the best presentations of a young relationship under stress: The Loneliest Planet

This movie is definitely not for everybody but both M and I were very taken by it and I would consider it almost unique in its qualities and one of the strongest, most believable presentations of a young relationship under stress that I've ever seen on film. The Loneliest Planet, a Sundance speical that has received almost no attention and stars only one well-known actor (Bernal) is essentially a three-person movie: a young North American couple - she's apparently from the U.S., he is a native Spanish speaker but no given nationality - traveling in the Republic of Georgia, hire a local guide and the three set off on a backpacking trip into the Georgian mountains. We know virtually nothing about the couple; all we know of their back story is that she is 30, they are engaged to be married in a few months, they have evidently done a lot of Third World travelling. We don't know what they do for a living, how they met, what brought them to Georgia (seems to be a part of a lengthy journey). We know nothing about the guide they hire either - at first - though in a scene near the end of the movie he tells the girl, Mica, a lot about the course of his life. Essentially, though, this is as close to documentary realism as a film can get: the characters don't expound on their back stories because that's just a narrative device; they live their lives, over the course of a few days, and we learn what one can learn through observations about their behavior and through bits and pieces of dialogue. There is almost no action at all in the film - except for one very dramatic short scene, and the entire film hinges on that scene and its aftermath. Incredibly well conveyed, scripted, and acted - apparently based on a short story by an author not well known (to me at least) - and I give the filmmaker - Latkov? - a lot of credit because this material is not in any way obviously cinematic. I've said there are essentially three characters, but the 4th and perhaps major character is the landscape itself. The movie in many ways is about how the landscape through which they hike forms, shapes, changes the relationships among the characters. There are some incredibly beautiful long, still takes of open landscape, mountains and escarpments and such, during which we watch the three hikers slowly trek across the screen - as beautiful as an abstract painting, but important to the cinema and the narrative as well helping us to understand the physical isolation of these characters, from others and from one another, and the challenges they are facing, physical and emotional. I'm checking right now to see the name of the director and of the woman who plays the girl, Mica, to give them both their due: director/writer Julia Loktev, actor Hani Furstenberg, author of story Tom Bissell. Excellent movie.