Una salida al campo
2014 · 9m · Venezuela
Directed by Enrique Conde
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A young Venezuelan couple decides to spend their day off in the countryside; in an idyllic environment, they discuss their future, but despite the good intentions, the crude reality will end up imposing itself.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise promises rupture—idyll corrupted by reality—but the film doesn't seem interested in subverting the pastoral-turns-dark arc; it just executes it, which is exactly the kind of competent-but-safe choice that puts me to sleep.
Conde sites this conversation within a deliberately composed landscape, letting the gap between their hopes and the encroaching world do its work through framing and duration rather than exposition—there's a real lineage here, from Bresson to contemporary slow cinema, and the restraint is earned.
The film's turning point lives in a single choice: the decision to keep the camera still on the couple while ambient sound shifts—birdsong to industrial hum—letting the soundtrack do the work of disillusionment that lesser films would impose through editing or music cues.