Tribeca Review: 57,000 Kilometers Between Us

Now here's a film that takes a little warming up to -- to be honest I actively disliked it for a little while -- but it actually pays some solid dividends to the dedicated viewer. That's not to say that Delphine Krueter's 57,000 Kilometers Between Us is an overlong or notably "difficult" piece to get through, but sometimes you just have to take Act I on faith that you'll be rewarded with something special. Perhaps best described as an Altman-ish black comedy about the ways in which we now communicate (sometimes exclusively) through video screens -- and how sometimes the "impersonal" communications are more meaningful than the "up close and personal" ones -- 57km is alternately smart, sad, sexy, and rather ironically amusing.

Though the film initially skips around in an episodic (some could say scattershot) fashion, once Kreueter has her characters laid down and her premise established, she starts slowly drawing the disparate characters closer together. What at first seems like a barely connected series of bleak domestic situations slowly becomes a cohesive whole. (Sorta.) Our main characters seem to be Margot (the excellent Florence Thomassin), her Internet-addicted daughter Nat (Marie Burgun), and her camera-obsessed husband Michel (Pascal Bongard) -- although almost equal attention is paid to married couple Khaled (Mohamed Rouabhi) and Nicole (Stephanie Michelini). (How it is that these families "connect" is both surprising and unexpectedly fascinating.)

That the film is shot in a suitably gritty handheld fashion makes sense: These are small stories about people who, for one strange reason or another, prefer to communicate through Internet exchanges, online video games, "secret" video camera websites, and a few much more ... unpleasant methods. Margot and Michel like to record their family exploits, which they then post on a website -- and get upset when readers leave nasty comments. On the other side of the equation, Nat has struck up a strange internet relationship with a man (Diving Bell's Mathieu Amalric) who likes to wear a diaper, which is pretty creepy, but she also makes a special new friend online....

Kreuter's best component is a subplot about a dying teenage boy named Adrien (Hadrien Bouvier), and how he uses online games to find a little bit of the human touch. This side-story between Adrien and Nat is infinitely more interesting than what's found in both of the married couples' misadventures, but (again) all the pieces start to fit together before too long, and the result is a bittersweet, intermittently amusing, and surprisingly insightful story about the the ways in which human interaction is impacted -- for better or for worse -- in today's increasingly more impersonal world.