Route of the Moon (Spain: Ruta de la luna), 2013.
Directed by Juan Sebastian Jacome.
Starring Jimmy David Suarez, Luis Antonio Gotti and Victoria Greco.
SYNOPSIS:
When Tito, an albino loner, decides to travel one thousand kilometers through Central America in order to compete in a bowling tournament; his ill and stubborn father insists in coming along and supporting his son for the first time in decades. The road will remind them the reasons why they have been disconnected from each other for so many years.
Screened in such proximity to the general release of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, Juan Sebastian Jacome’s Route of the Moon will no doubt draw inevitable comparisons with Payne’s 2013 dramedy. Jacome’s film, too, features a road trip for son and ailing father to spend some long overdue time together, through a wacky proposal that forces them out onto the road. Route of the Moon is, however, with its gorgeous Central American backdrop and brief 75-minute running time, simultaneously the more palatable of the two and the least substantial.
After fading former boxing coach Cesar (Luis Antonio Gotti) leaves hospital following a heart scare, he and his son, lonely divorcee Tito (newcomer Jimmy David Suarez), traverse 1,000 miles of Central American road (from Costa Rica to Panama) for Tito to take part in a bowling tournament. Along the way, they open up old wounds and pick up hitchhiker Yadia (Victoria Greco), a young woman stuck between countries and trying to get back home. Transported from one dilapidated township to another, these unlikely travel companions pass through unspoiled open country, seeking comfort in the familiarity of their old, crumbling homes.
There’s a certain sadness to this fact – Tito, Cesar and Yadia are freer and apparently happier in the verdant space away from their unexciting lives, yet they travel on regardless, back to urban mundanity and onto an ambiguous, weirdly touching final scene involving the hollowed-out pumpkin Yadia carries throughout the film. It’s not as maddeningly whimsical as it sounds, and that Tito happens to have albinism also thankfully isn’t used as one of those hollow ‘quirks’ indie movies sometimes wield as a way of standing out. Though Suarez isn’t the most engaging of performers, he nonetheless provides a sensitive understanding of the condition that’s regularly unseen in cinema.
As Yadia, Victoria Greco’s lively presence is a necessary counterpoint to the more downbeat energies of both Suarez and Gotti. It’s ultimately so difficult to sympathise with Tito and Cesar that any emotional reaction desired by Jacome for their fraught relationship is out of reach. It would’ve been much easier for Jacome to use the somewhat peripheral Yadia as his audience’s way in – she’s caring and warm where the warring father and son are stubborn and self-centred, with both of them harbouring negative views of women as their objects. It’s Yadia, and not ostensible leads Tito and Cesar, who emerges as the hero of this film.
Route of the Moon’s jazzy Latin soundtrack and sunny, natural photography at least means the film never allows the dourness of father and son’s relationship to become overbearing. Ultimately more could’ve been said, though, about the road, the journey or the trio’s shaky dynamic – in a way it seems writer/director Jacome was halfway there, the film brisk enough to sustain interest but too short to burrow all that deep. It’s not often in cinema’s modern, bloated times that you’re given economy and cry instead for extra length, but Route of the Moon could’ve used it to make that complete journey.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Brogan Morris – Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the young princes. Follow Brogan on Twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion.
Originally published April 11, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
