If there is one true rule of filmmaking, it is this: You don’t kill the dog. Enter the dog into a hamburger eating contest – yes. Have the dog traipse across America with another dog and a cat – yes. Kill the dog – no.
THE LONG WAY HOME does its best to kill off Elvis, the ailing mutt at the film’s centre. It digs graves with twigs, stones and fingernails, and the pumping techno from the car stereo almost drowns the muffled squeals from the rear boot. It’s not the easiest scene to watch. Elvis and his beleaguered owner, Joel (Borja Espinosa), ain’t no Turner and Hooch, that’s for sure. So how does the story remain so doggedly empathetic?
Sergi Perez’s film has something of a Rottweiler’s heart. It’s gruff, and it snarls. Frequently it delves into scrapes to which you wish you weren’t led. It veers between gnashing and whimpering, and in its most testing moments, lurches savagely close to feral violence as Joel almost brutalizes one of his partner’s former colleagues. Yet like all dangerous dogs, there’s a history of suffering below the bared teeth – and it’s the scars, physical and emotional, that drive Joel to his snarling pugnacity.
Joel’s pain is a fresh wound. Beneath his exasperation and frenzy a larger, longer crisis begins to surface. Conversations allude to a girlfriend “not here”, as Joel asks “Where did she used to leave her car?”, or insists that “She always left keys everywhere”. It is not until we note his inability to contact either of their families that we begin to suspect her fate was a tragic one. Locked out of the flat where they lived together, Joel is forced back into the memories of a lost life. His skin pasty and wraith-like, he haunts former contacts for aid, desperate to evaporate back to a lonesome existence, yet caught in a personal purgatory until the keys are found.
Who is Joel? Do we even know this character?
The brilliance of Borja Espinosa’s largely lone performance is the conveyance of this hell-drawn push-and-pull. There’s something erratic merely in his character’s presence. Nothing bears comfortable ground. Jutting from long drawn-out stares to uncontrollable tics, he just can’t find an equilibrium. He really doesn’t want to be there, but circumstance leaves no other option. A gut-grinding mixture of volatile movement and woe-begone, slumped shoulders embody the image of the plot’s teetering descent: a precipice of violent hysteria on one side, suicidal apathy on the other.
In one scene, Joel tries to extract a set of keys from his former girlfriend’s parents. He pulls up in the further most corner of the adjoining carpark and hides below the bonnet. The seconds tick by. He calls a member of the family (maybe his girlfriend’s brother) and pleads for a favour. The keys have to be retrieved but without his presence being known – especially not by the parents. No details are given and Joel won’t move from behind the bonnet of his car. He waits, sucking the air in. Upon seeing the figures of her parents advance towards him, the omnipresent techno from the stereo lurches back into the car and Joel slams on the accelerator, speeding past the shouting pair.
Alongside a shuddering example of Joel’s mental space, the scene trembles with Perez’s canny use of light. Suffocated in the stark white Catalonian light, Joel is a stray in the headlights, or a ghoul without the shadows. His presence is awkward and anxious, and his cowering below the wheel might as well be to escape the sun’s unveiling glare. For the rest of the film our protagonist is more frequently masked. As he wakes alone in his bed, Joel’s face is severed by shadow. As he sits in his deceased partner’s office, the gloom leaves his figure almost entirely obscured. The camera takes to glancing Joel through doorways or in wing mirrors. In one scene, a travel across the city is almost entirely shown from the back of Joel’s head.
As you’re pushed away and away, you have to wonder – Who is Joel? Do we even know this character? Herein lies Perez’s film. The name – THE LONG WAY HOME – could as much refer to Joel’s return to himself as a debacle over keys. His identity is lost in his grief and must be retrieved. Elvis, a pet clinging to life, is the final and maybe most painful memory of all that’s been lost. Joel may want to let the dog go or leave him in the woods, but it’s Joel that will end up truly abandoned.
httpvh://youtu.be/ksaC9hYiJew