This is not a documentary. I'm pretty certain I'm right about that. It dresses like one, has the trappings of one, but it is full of contrived situations, camera movements, moments that are being enacted rather than experienced and reported by observation. It's also a bit slow at nearly two and a half hours.
A Dutchman in winter. A Japanese woman in spring. A Brazilian woman in summer. All three are walking the pilgrims' road to Santiago. Much of the script is voice-over, and what dialogue there is sounds scripted and, well, contrived for the movie. There's no reason why such an approach shouldn't work - the project apparently took five years to complete - and I'm sure everything that was done was sincerely meant, but it has a painful (for me) artificiality to it. Perhaps its because there are now so many documentaries about the Compostela trail, and several feature films, that a movie like Tres en el camino, which has a rotten English title (Within The Way Without), and which sort of hovers between documentary and fiction, now appears so contrived and unconvincing.
Perhaps just the Dutch pilgrim and the Japanese, the two that are the more eloquent, and leave out the flash forwards to Japan/Holland, which arrive at untimely moments, and I think this could have worked more successfully. As it is, I found it a wearisome and artificial, unworthy of its object.
A Dutchman in winter. A Japanese woman in spring. A Brazilian woman in summer. All three are walking the pilgrims' road to Santiago. Much of the script is voice-over, and what dialogue there is sounds scripted and, well, contrived for the movie. There's no reason why such an approach shouldn't work - the project apparently took five years to complete - and I'm sure everything that was done was sincerely meant, but it has a painful (for me) artificiality to it. Perhaps its because there are now so many documentaries about the Compostela trail, and several feature films, that a movie like Tres en el camino, which has a rotten English title (Within The Way Without), and which sort of hovers between documentary and fiction, now appears so contrived and unconvincing.
Perhaps just the Dutch pilgrim and the Japanese, the two that are the more eloquent, and leave out the flash forwards to Japan/Holland, which arrive at untimely moments, and I think this could have worked more successfully. As it is, I found it a wearisome and artificial, unworthy of its object.
