Somewhere Beautiful

Somewhere Beautiful (2014) could be one of the most interesting, yet also one of the most frustrating movies that I’ve seen in the past few years. There are moments of beauty and some terrific filmmaking, however, there are also moments of head-scratching and trying to figure out just what the heck is going on here. The movie is about two stories that intertwine throughout the film. They don’t have much to do with each other, as far as I could tell. The first story takes place in Argentina and occurs during a photo shoot, it is a love triangle type of story. The second story being about a doomed marriage that stars Director Albert Kodagolian and is set in Los Angeles.

Argentina Story. This story has three actors and is shot on a 16 mm camera. The purpose of using that camera is to capture the Argentinian landscapes and Kodagolian does so beautifully. What he doesn’t do is tell a coherent story. The three people in the story are a photographer, his girlfriend, and a hired man to carry the equipment and help set things up. For reasons that I won’t give away, the girl and the hired hand begin to sneak messages back and forth that they like each other and a love triangle story begins. The problem is that not much happens and even worse, it doesn’t have anything to do with the other story so the editing doesn’t make much sense to me.

Doomed Marriage. The Los Angeles portion of the film is sleek, shiny, and shot on 35 mm. We see big glass houses and again Kodagolian does a great job of using location to his advantage. What he doesn’t do is tell a compelling story. The story is about a woman who has decided that she is tired of being with her husband so she has left him and he is now forced to carry his child with him to his movie set. I was hoping that the two stories would tie together in the last act, or even in the last moment and everything would make sense, but that part of the film either went over my head or it didn’t happen.