From Bright Lights Film:
“Accidental crowd” could be applied to Delphine Kreuter’s debut feature 57,000 Kilometers Between Us. The whirling narrative centers on a family who mediates its malfunctioning through camcorders, blogs, the Internet, anything but facing each other. Nat (Marie Burgun) lives with her newly remarried mother, Margot (Florence Thomassin), and stepfather, Michel (Pascal Bongard), who is determined to record every moment of everyone in the household. Hidden away in her room, Nat tries to maintain a connection to her transsexual father, now Nicole (Stephanie Michelini) and husband Khaled (Mohamed Rouabhi). She has a budding online romance with fellow teenager Adrien (Hadrien Bouvier), isolated in a cancer ward, and a more troubled link with a man (Mathieu Amalric) happiest in diapers. The description brings to mind the contrived kinkiness of generically edgy movies, but photographer and video artist Kreuter never falls back on the merely quirky. Relying on hand-held cameras and alternating between digital video and film, she makes the viewer feel just as disoriented as the characters do. Often difficult to watch, 57,000 Kilometers Between Us is a bleak dispatch on where unchecked access to technology leads. Although Kreuter has concentrated several pathologies into one family, none of the situations particularly strains credulity: they’re on offer to anyone who cares to trawl the Internet. Perhaps most chilling is Adrien’s well-to-do mother who chooses to turn off her screen for her nightly camcorder dinners with her chemo-bald teenage son. Dressed up at formal place setting, she talks to the blank screen in an image worthy of Bunuel.
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