Jason says: “There’s
a lot to like about Christoph Behl’s post-apocalyptic love triangle,
and the fact that it can be described as such without coming across as
an annoying genre mismatch is just the start. It’s a neat little entry
into the canon of small stories that take place during the end of the
world, albeit one that sacrifices most of the immediate physical damage
to do it.
“As far as they can tell – and in any real sense that matters – Axel
(Lautaro Delgado) and Jonathan (William Prociuk) may be the last two
men on Earth, with Ana (Victoria Almeida) the last woman. They’ve
converted a house into a fortress and come up with rules to ensure
their survival as well as (hopefully) their sanity, but it’s no
surprise that they’re starting to reach their breaking point. Maybe it
could have gone on indefinitely when it was just Axel and Jonathan, but
adding Ana makes it a situation that is never going to go smoothly,
even if things didn’t wind up with Ana and Jonathan together and Axel
burning with desire.
“The cast is terrific in a situation where one not playing up to the
standards set by the other two could have sunk the whole enterprise, or
at least reduced it to something much less interesting. Behl makes the
somewhat interesting choice of not having Axel’s obsession bleed into
envy, which makes the scenes with just Delgado and Prociuk a little
more interesting. There’s a sense of them being perfectly
complimentary, with Axel’s intensity a bit unnerving but Prociuk
getting a certain amount of the same effect by portraying Jonathan as
kind of laid-back – not the kind that gets people killed through
inattention, but right on the border of detachment, a distinction that
is not easy to see immediately.
“If they’re playing opposites, Victoria Almeida plays Ana as trying to
hold the center, and she’s on the great side. She gives off a ‘one of
the boys’ vibe in the early going but sheds it easily as the focus
moves to other things, although there’s never reason to doubt her
capability as the film goes on. Almeida is the one who gets the most
out of the videotaped confessionals that are integrated into the film,
giving the audience an unfiltered look at her as she moved between
sentimentality, nervousness, and fury, though they come out just as
well when she is paired with either or both of the men.
“That congressional element is a crutch in a lot of movies, and it
starts out that way in THE DESERT, but Behl finds a way to not only
integrate it into the story but also quietly show how civilization
consumes itself, especially during the fall. A bit of clever
structuring and editing in the last act makes the movie something close
to heartbreaking at times, and the design of the world is clever and
informative, from how the group has the outside of their building wired
for sound to the name Ana gives the zombies she kills. There are flies
everywhere and they’re unnerving, both the ones buzzing around the
house and the ones tattooed on Axel’s skin.
“And yet… The movie doesn’t quite run out of steam, but it does bump
up against its barriers on occasion. Behl and company don’t seem to
have the resources to depict a post-apocalyptic world outside of the
house, and it often comes across as limited rather than claustrophobic.
It’s also the sort of movie where identifying any particular scene that
needs to go or be tightened is difficult, but where the cumulative
effect of not a whole lot happening starts to wear on the viewer, and
the particular wheel-spinning that goes on after a big change midway
through is going to rub some folks the wrong way. I felt a little more
fidgety than I really should have coming out of it, even if I liked
most of what it was doing.
“The filmmakers are doing a lot of good work at a fairly small scale,
and you can argue that this sort of focusing on a small group and
amplifying their interactions is what the zombie subgenre does the
best. Bits of THE DESERT are sticking with me better than anything from
bigger, more ‘complete’ movies, and I get the feeling that fans of
Christoph Behl and Victoria Almeida may be looking it up years from now
after they have some high-profile success. 3.25 cats
“Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival:
Camera
Lucida, DCP)” |
