10.000 Km – Review

Whether you know it or not, love is one of the grand constants of cinema; our relationships with characters, our investment in a film’s story, and even our perception of morality is all tied up in the L word, and how the tricky thing meddles with everything it touches. But it’s still something that can be tested – and in 10.000 km, the remarkably well-observed feature from first-time director Carlos Marques-Marcet, that test happens to be quarter of the planet’s circumference.

For Alex and Sergi – played by Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer respectively – life is easy. As a couple, they could not be in a better place, having forged their relationship into an iron-clad thing of familiarity over the course of seven years in beautiful Barcelona. There’s even talk of having a baby. But that’s all thrown into the air when Alex receives a life-changing email, tantalising her with an opportunity to move to Los Angeles and live there for an entire year, working a dream job. The only snag? Sergi has a life, and work, in Barcelona. They choose the long-distance relationship path; what ensues are Skype dates, a lot of laptop hugging, and waves of overwhelming loneliness.

As a two-hander, 10.000 km does brilliant things with its two leads; after a somewhat lacklustre opening scene, this slight little film then zips into dual-screen mode where the two actors actually do more apart than when they’re together. For the bulk of its run time, the film’s screen is replaced by that of a computer screen, as they smile at one another through laggy connections, attempting to keep the flame burning, lying to themselves that they don’t miss each other that much. But naturally, the cracks soon show in a few short months; even though this chamber piece has the potential to fall into mundane, slow-paced character study mode, things are always enlivened by a breath of relatable humour (mostly to do with technology and our constant battle with it), and it says a lot more about modern romance than most contemporary, conventional films do. Like the classic Sleepless in Seattle, this movie keeps its lovers apart – and we quickly realise that those 10,000 kilometres aren’t necessarily of the physical kind.