Alessandro Zunino's sly transformational obscurely poised Lost in Laos potentially situates a metamockumentary between two worlds, wherein survival is latticed with familial, relational, and biological vertebrae, adrift in the Laotian jungle, anxiously struggling at home.
On the bilateral, feisty student Daniela (Daniela Camera) sets out with her partner Paolo (Daniele Pitari) to intermingle inebriated and impressionistic filmic observations as part of a wild abandoned ad hoc international trance known as Lost in Laos.
She keeps in contact with her traditional parents until too many substances are consumed at once and she wakes up with Paolo miles from town, down the river, passports and related pieces of identification missing, no food, soaking wet, lost.
The credits set up the film's serious yet sardonic transitional identifications by creatively yet dazzlingly introducing each letter of the crew's names before the name appears in full, at that point in time each character possessing a stable conception of self developed over time, after which the full name breaks apart into its individual components, thereby foreshadowing the upcoming psychological turmoil by the letter.
The creative yet dazzling dynamic sets up the surreal metamockumentary exposition as well, Lost in Laos intellectually diversifying its subject matter while picturesquely percolating a piquant self-awareness, whose bright abnegations voyeuristically mystify.
The boundary between truth and fiction forms part of Daniela's thesis and this dialectical deployment caused me to wonder if the film was really about either an aging professional couple imagining what life would have been like if they had taken more risks, or a young adventurous couple theorizing on the benefits of a bourgeois life spent together.
At which point I had to take mockumentary itself into consideration, wondering if Zunino was eruditely lampooning this style of analysis to simply present a troublemaking voyage of discovery.
Difficult to say.
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