How Much Further (Qué Tan Lejos)
This is a road movie with a difference. It’s not an action-packed trip, but an emotional journey, focusing on two main characters: surly and bookish college student Tristeza (“Sadness”- Cecilia Vallejo) and optimistic vacationing travel agent Esperanza (“Hope” - Tania Martinez).
The two women meet whilst travelling by bus to Cuenco, a small town in Ecuador. When a snap strike leaves them stranded, headstrong Tristeza, determined to reach her destination in a timely manner, decides to hitchhike. Esperanza reluctantly agrees, and so begins their journey.
Esperanza, the older of the two women, is much like Tristeza’s older sister, though it’s the sort of relationship between adult sisters where the younger sister is, in some respects smarter than her older counterpart. However, what Esperanza lacks in academic intelligence, she makes up for with life experience, and is able to accurately appraise Tristeza’s predicament on more than one occasion.
Tristeza is full of contradictions: a supposedly independent woman, yet we essentially see her traipsing over the countryside to reach her boyfriend so that she can stop him from marrying someone else. She denounces the bourgeois concept of marriage, but the fact that she feels some sense of ownership or entitlement over him seems to have escaped her. She fancies herself as a politically aware, educated girl: not a common villager. In keeping with that, and her loyalty towards her country’s culture, she amusingly states that she should take up the cause of the transport workers who went out on strike – even though she has no idea about the cause for which they were striking.
Esperanza, on the other hand, has travelled widely, yet remains surprisingly unjaded by her broad experiences with the world and what it has to offer, One gets the feeling that it is because she’s more caught up in the landscapes and photo-opportunities than the grittier realities beneath the surface.
Along the way, they encounter Jesus, who is taking his grandmother (or rather her ashes) to a village to be scattered according to her wishes. The three of them in turn meet up with other interesting characters during this trip. But it is the emotional journey of the two protagonists that is at the heart of this story.
The film’s quasi-Buddhist message is that we are, each of us, on our own journey, and that people will enter and exit our lives and touch us in their own unique way, or perhaps not at all. The important thing, as Jesus tells Esperanza, is to resist the tendency to hang on to whatever or whoever comes into our lives.
Other themes, including the notion that it is the journey and not the destination that is most vital in our lives, that we could be more accepting (especially of ourselves), and of the need to live in the moment might sound trite, but we could all use a reminder – especially when it’s so beautifully presented.
But don’t think for one second that the audience is bashed over the head with these messages. They never get in the way of the story. How Much Further is a most endearing and gently amusing film, with an uncredited character of tremendous importance: the Ecuadorian landscape.
It’s extraordinary how far we must travel, in order to discover some home truths.