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I’ll give Aaltra a lot of credit for one thing: it is by far the strangest film I’ve watched in quite a while. It is a road trip film, of a sort, concerning two unnamed characters who are, to be blunt, assholes. They are feuding neighbors, and one incident too far puts them both in a terrible position: namely, relying on each other. The more they try to get away from each other, the more they get pushed together, and both characters have wide arcs that lead them to becoming entirely different people. Unfortunately, both those new people are still assholes. Just a different kind of asshole.
We’ll call one of them the business man (I think he has referred to as Mr. Vives once in the film) and the other as the farm hand. The business man is clearly more interested in his motocross obsession than with his grieving wife (a miscarriage is implied) or the fact that his boss wants to fire him. During a teleconference, he abruptly leaves the meeting to go outside and harangue his neighbor, the farm hand, for spraying pesticide too close to his house.
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The farm hand, for his part, is blissfully ignorant of the world around him. He puts on his headphones and ignores his boss, shirks his responsibilities, and frequently blocks the entire road with his combine. The pesticide incident prompts the confrontation that pulls the business man away from his teleconference, which in turn makes his boss demand he be at a meeting in Paris, in 30-minutes, or become an ex-employee. Except the farmhand is once again blocking the road. After losing his job, the business man returns home to find his wife being mounted from behind by another man. This sends him over the edge, and he runs outside and starts a fistfight with the farmhand.
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During the course of this fight, the farmhand’s trailer, for which he was behind on his payments, rolls over the men, sending them both to the hospital, where they are forced to share a room, much to their chagrin. When they are released, they are both paraplegics, and both destitute. No jobs, no money, no family. They are so inept that mutual, separate suicide attempts are utter failures, and each decides on a course of action with their now useless lives: the business man will attend some big deal motocross event, and the farmhand will seek out the company that made his trailer, the titular company Aaltra, and demand compensation.
| Along the way both men are mugged, and without ID they cannot claim the tickets they booked on the train, and, penniless, begin scheming to get enough money to make their individual trips. Somewhere between the ignominy of being undocumented, broke cripples, and the realization that neither will reach their goal without relying on the other for assistance, both of their wigs flip, and they begin a tirade against all of humanity. No deed is too amoral for them, and no kind citizen above being taken advantage of. In fact, it seems to be a point of pride for the two men to see just how much they can abuse the good-nature and patience of people coming to their aid. |
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In this bizarre way the two men become unlikely friends, while further alienating themselves from the rest of the world. A lot of the movie is slow-moving, but you’re bound to get a self-indulgent film when the two stars are also the co-writers and co-directors. And to tell the truth, for most of the movie I was not invested. I failed to see the comedy of the film, and only saw two jerk-offs I’d rather not be watching. The motocross stuff seemed a touch too incongruent, even for such a movie as this, and long shots of the two wheelchair-bound men racing down hills and an entire performance by a Dutch lounge singer seemed attempts at padding the running time.
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However, the final few scenes in the film, when they realize the farmhand’s ambition of finding the Aaltra company, pull the whole film together. I honestly laughed out loud, and shook my head with how perfect it was. If you can set an hour and a half aside for this movie, and stick with it even when your thumb is itching for that stop button, I think you’ll find it was entirely worth the effort. In fact, I’m having a chuckle right now just thinking about it. |
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