Eureka (2023)

 

Director Lisandro Alonso

Alonso on the set

EUREKA                   B                                                                                                                Argentina  France  Mexico  Germany  Portugal  Switzerland  Great Britain  (147 mi)  2023  d: Lisandro Alonso

The memory of man is uncertain.  There’s little difference between what you think you are and what you really are.                                                                                                                         —Maya el Coronel (Chiara Mastroianni)

Born in Buenos Aires in 1975, Lisandro Alonso studied for three years at the Fundación Universidad del Cine, working as an assistant director and sound designer until making his first feature in 2001, founding his own production company 4L to produce his own films, where all of his features have premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, including La Libertad (Freedom) (2001), Los Muertos (2004), and Liverpool (2008), aptly named the Lonely Men Trilogy, blending traditions of documentary with narrative film as each explores loneliness in the solitary lives of the rural poor by following a near wordless journey of isolated protagonists in remote regions who barely utter a word as they journey through unchartered territory that may as well be the end of the world.  One of the director’s interests is to confront the viewer with primitive ways of life that are as far removed from civilization as possible, where the mysterious world they live in becomes the central focus of the film.  Working almost exclusively with non-professional actors, he decided to work with Danish actor Viggo Mortensen in the historical drama Jauja (2014), set in 19th century Denmark and Argentina, exploring themes of eroticism and existentialism as it moves from a deadpan western into a hypnotic, trance-like odyssey, greatly enhanced by the lush color photography from Aki Kaurismäki’s cinematographer Timo Salminen.  Premiering in 2023 at Cannes in the Cannes Premiėre section, where it was overshadowed by all the press following Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), this film was shot in Spain, Portugal, the United States, and Mexico, where Alonso has discovered a new technique of superimposing screen images into dissolves that fade into new images, while continuing his practice of using long, uninterrupted shots, often in lengths greater than 7 to 10 minutes per shot, so this is a hypnotically slow film style.  Everyone talked about the frigid working conditions shooting Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015), as it was mentioned in nearly every review, but temperatures on this film got down to 30 below when shooting at night, regularly freezing the equipment, with Timo Salminen collapsing at one point, as his lungs shut down from the freezing cold, where he was taken away in an ambulance, replaced temporarily by Mauro Herce, so what was originally intended to be three weeks extended to two months, while also dealing with Covid protocols, but those same voices are silent here, which only accentuates just how subjective film criticism can be.  Reuniting with Viggo Mortensen in the opening segment, while also working with Chiara Mastroianni, who is like the reincarnation of Joan Crawford in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), recalling the black and white cinematography of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), this film explores the ways in which Native people inhabit their specific environments, living in communities that remain marginalized, with limited access to resources and opportunities, frequently overrun by disillusionment and despair, creating an uncompromising portrayal of Native American life.  Spanning different time periods and continents, Alonso’s elusive and at times almost hallucinatory film is an extraordinarily rich, open-ended work of what the director describes as “uncertain conclusions,” perhaps exploring the space between dream and myth, brimming with ambiguous allusions and unexpected associations.  Like all of Alonso’s films, viewers are given a vaguely elusive idea of what we are witnessing, moving from genre to mysticism, featuring characters who have nothing to lose as they are so completely lost in themselves, given a dreamlike canvas to work with, aspiring to its own transcendence.    

For the second time following Jauja, Viggo Mortensen and Viilbjørk Malling Agger play father and daughter, captured in a heavily stylized, black and white Native American western along the Mexico and U.S. border in the 1870’s, drawing us into the imaginary world of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, which describes the violence of Western expansion and frontier life, the massacres that took place, and the utter absence of laws to protect people, with Mortensen tracking down his daughter in a lawless town where Mastroianni is the gun-slinging owner of a saloon filled with trigger-happy cowboys, drunken Indians, and half-naked prostitutes, shooting the men holding his daughter, only to discover an unexpected twist where what we are watching is a serial installment of a TV show being watched in contemporary times.  It’s a clever shift, traversing time and space, telling three different stories in three different times, suddenly finding ourselves on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the poorest regions in America, a place Alonso has visited several times, but this is the first time he’s shot a film in the United States, which feels like a notable change, as he’s broadening his horizons while still maintaining his infatuation with isolated places and the toll it takes on those living in such remote places.  This is a fascinating study of a lone Native American police officer, Officer Debonna (Alaina Clifford), as we follow her while she meticulously makes her rounds on night patrol in the snow while regularly checking in with dispatch, which consists of the search for a child, the arbitration of a domestic conflict, traffic incidents, and a casino shooting, where reinforcements are not available, so the young woman has to improvise and adapt to overcome the problems alone.  It also simultaneously explores the life of her niece Sadie Lapointe, a young Native American woman who coaches high school basketball, yet is also guided by her grandfather’s tribal wisdom, able to achieve an altered reality, like something out of Carlos Castaneda.  The aching loneliness of life on a desolate reservation has never been more apparent, creating a disconnect and emotional void that simply can’t be filled, leading to alcoholism, drug abuse, inexplicable violence, and heightened suicide levels, which are more than double that of the mainstream population, and the highest suicide rate of any population group in the United States (The Issue of High Native American Suicide Rates).  Alonso tackles this subject head-on, refusing to shy away from the obvious discomfort, as it’s part of the challenge of living on a reservation, which is such a remote geographical region, literally cut off from the rest of the world.  Depicted with a raw honesty, Alonso adopts a near documentary approach, offering a searing observational realism that also takes us into the Amazon rainforests during the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1970’s, with elements of magical realism where a large CGI jabiru stork seems to transport us into the different realms, posing metaphysical questions about colonial influences on native peoples, establishing mysterious connections between the passage of time and the different cultures who have inhabited these remote regions, cut off from their traditions, where society today is not that different from what was going on hundreds of years ago, as tolerance for these cultures is no more accepted now as then, still having to deal with widespread violence, corruption, and ignorance.  In a time when there were no laws, the power resided with the fastest guns, which has now been passed on to those that make the rules or authoritatively sign the nefarious deals, suggesting not much has changed, calling into question the very idea of progress.   

Recalling Chloé Zhao’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2016) and 2018 Top Ten Film List #1 The Rider, both of which were shot on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, with the director living there for four years, yet also Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River (2017), which was shot on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, Brooke Pepion Swaney’s 2022 Top Ten List #9 Daughter of the Lost Bird, which tackles the systematic adoption of Native children to outside communities, and Kent Mackenzie’s devastating urban portrait in The Exiles (1961), an early 1960’s film about American Indians adapting to the congested city environment of Los Angeles, which features an ungodly amount of alcohol consumption, where city Indians bring with them the same social issues from the reservation to the city.  Giving thanks to an international collective of independent voices like Roberto Minervini, Kelly Reichardt, Corneliu Porumboiu, and Dennis Lim, author and director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, this is about as far removed from the films of John Ford as you can get, literally redefining spaces that are generally absent from history and the world of cinema, becoming an elliptical meditation on the experiences of indigenous communities across the Americas.  A film that resists easy categorization, dreamily moving in and out of time periods, with no illuminating explanations within the film, the connecting link is people who have been marginalized by society, who have sought isolation, not that they had a choice, but it offers a protection against the toxic influences of the more heavily populated regions who maintain authoritative and political control, still posing a problem to them.  Death is a pervasive theme, as it invades these isolated spaces, often coming out of nowhere, like a mysterious force, as there aren’t nearby hospitals or medical centers, so people are largely on their own, where the life expectancy is considerably lower for residents of the Pine Ridge reservation (by twenty years!), the lowest anywhere in the United States, while also plagued by an 80 to 90% unemployment rate, with more than 80% of residents suffering from alcoholism (described as liquid genocide), where the persistent problems are rooted in America’s colonial history (Life on the Pine Ridge Native American reservation), standing defiantly against the corrosive forces of history, yet subject to the laws of nature.  The film is essentially an exploratory journey through time, like an undiscovered frontier, where some obviously get lost along the way, like buried secrets, losing contact with their own identity, where the natural scenery couldn’t be more intoxicating, as we follow a group mining for gold in the rivers, also a ceremony of recounting dreams out in the jungle, yet a common element is a pervasive loneliness that leaves them feeling strangely distant and alienated from themselves and their culture.  Thought-provoking and mesmerizingly beautiful, an enigmatic work that simply doesn’t look like other films, penetrating into mythical spaces, co-written by Alonso with Martín Caamaño and Fabián Casas, delving into themes of loss and the quest for personal redemption, painting a picture of the harsh realities facing indigenous communities, who routinely deal with poverty and neglect.  Despite their profound connection to the land, indigenous peoples are always moving, transcending the bounds of their physical state, where their ancestral beliefs and mysticism have been crushed by Manifest Destiny and its devastating aftereffects, erasing their connection to the land while shattering their cultural equilibrium.

Jauja

JAUJA                        B+                  

Argentina  Denmark  France  Mexico  Germany  Brazil  Netherlands  USA  (109 mi)  2014      
d:  Lisandro Alonso             Official site [Japan]

My films aren’t narratives. I observe people, different moments, and I put them all together in the film. The audience has to imagine or create something sitting in the chair.   

—Lisandro Alonso, from Michael Guillen interview, August 28, 2009, Twitch: director interview

This may be the most accessible of all of Alonso’s films, most of which are imbued with a plotless, dreamlike quality that resembles more of an atmospheric state of mind than a coherent storyline.  Every one of his films pits solitary men in extremely barren and isolated circumstances in search of some largely unknowable destiny, using little to no dialogue, where the harshness of the desolate landscape offers a commentary on the difficult and often deteriorating psychological state of mind.  While all his films include lengthy, uninterrupted wordless sequences bordering on the abstract, this one does as well, while also offering a bit more clearly defined dialogue and an actual historical backdrop, including a recognizable narrative and more clues than usual that at least initially offer a map to begin with before the journey takes us into unchartered territory, leading us into mysteriously inexplicable destinations that remain elusive and ambiguous, leaving each individual viewer something of a Rorschach test to make sense out of.  One thing’s for sure – a significant amount of time passes which does seem to alter the landscape considerably, where there is a final coda, much like there is in Pocahontas’s abrupt visit to the ornate civilization of British royalty in Malick’s The New World (2005), that in this film jumps ahead more than 100 years, offering an unusual perspective to say the least.  Like Malick, the film begins in a specific moment in history, and while never named, it is likely the 1870’s and early 1880’s campaign by Chile and Argentina to wipe out the indigenous populations in Patagonia, and what might be read as an allegory about colonialism soon takes a circuitous path through mythology into an unrecognizable dreamscape, with touches of the supernatural found along the way.  No historical background of this purge is provided, though in a time of Chilean expansion into Patagonia, historian Ward Churchill has claimed that the indigenous Mapuche population dropped from a total of half a million to 25,000 within a generation as a result of the notoriously brutal military assault on the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia that led to their subjugation.  Coinciding with the Chilean intrusion, Argentina General Julio Argentino Roca (who was eventually named their President) was instructed to settle the frontier problem of Patagonia, which he did by directing a military campaign known as the Conquest of the Desert, which established Argentine dominance in the region and effectively ended the possibility of Chilean expansion while also killing and displacing tens of thousands of Indians from their traditional lands.  Once rid of Indians, ethnic European settlers eventually developed the lands for agriculture, turning Argentina into an agricultural superpower in the early 20th century.  This is a particularly contentious period of Argentinean history, where the Conquest is commemorated on the 100 peso bill in Argentina, which some historians have claimed brought Civilization to an otherwise wild frontier, opening the lands to European farmers, while others have claimed it was little more than genocide.

Alonso has always used nonprofessional actors and written his own material, though here he collaborates with a professional writer, Argentine poet and novelist Fabián Casas, while working with an internationally recognized star in Viggo Mortensen, who also contributes the music, as well as longtime Aki Kaurismäki cameraman Timo Salminen, who certainly elevates the look and production values of the film, where much of it, with the boxed frame and rounded corners, is meant to resemble old photographs.  Coming six years after his previous feature Liverpool (2008) that remains arguably his best work, and the first to feature such extensive interior psychology, as does this follow up work, the film opens with inner titles making reference to Jauja, an ancient Incan settlement founded by the Spanish conquistadors that subsequently became Peru’s capital city, suggestive of a land of plenty, or El Dorado, a mythical utopian paradise that drew many on an endless quest for its discovery, but eventually driving them to ruin.  This “big lie” was invented to get Europeans on board the ships in quest of adventure, where the inhospitable lands that greeted them were endlessly desolate and empty, a sparsely populated region at the southern tip of South America consisting of deserts, steppes, and grasslands where only indigenous Indians roamed wild.  Nonetheless, the lure of hidden riches suggests Werner Herzog’s AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972) and the ruthless Spanish expeditions in search of lost cities filled with wealth and gold.  This brief outline guides us to a journey into a distant new world, where Danish captain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen) and his fifteen year-old daughter Ingeborg (Viilbjørk Mallin Agger) are stationed with the Argentine army at a remote coastal outpost in Patagonia teeming with giant seals sunning themselves on the rocks, their purpose only vaguely hinted at, as Dinesen is a military engineer, with dozens of soldiers dispatched to dig trenches in the hot sun under his orders, presumably hired to build up the army’s defenses for the Conquest.  The film is uniquely set in two distinct places and time periods, linking the past to the present, where the lengthy opening sequence may all be a dream by Ingeborg, a young girl living in a Danish castle in the present, imagining herself connected to Dinesen in some mysterious way.  Dressed in the finest European fashion, she is of an age to be leered at by the crude and lecherous army officers, whose racist regard for Indians is equally troubling, causing her father some concern, but rather than allow them to indulge their pleasures, she decides instead to run off into the wilderness with a handsome young soldier (Misael Saavedra), where the outlying landscape becomes some idyllic natural paradise.  Dinesen quickly chases after her, where the marshy grasslands turn into a desolate rocky terrain, as the everpresent sounds of birds disappear altogether, leaving him alone in a solitary existence where the changing topography only grows more empty and barren, where he may as well be on the surface of the moon.

Through a long and treacherous journey, much of which resembles the years-long search of Ethan Edwards in THE SEARCHERS (1956), Dinesen loses all traces of his former self, where the very things that define him, his map, his discipline, his hat, his firearm, and even his horse, are lost along the way, where he’s forced to continue his seemingly endless journey on foot, step by step, where the man is literally consumed by the enveloping landscape of emptiness that stretches to infinity in all directions.  With its similarly congested box shape and equally futile search through the expanse of the arid desert, though in search of water, the film parallels Kelly Reichardt’s Meek's Cutoff (2010), as both reveal the aimless wanderings across a desolate frontier, leading to a deteriorating state of mind as they run short of faith and water.  In one extraordinary sequence, Dinesen rides off into the desert singing what is perhaps an army song, where the accompanying piano and guitar composition was written by the man seen drifting offscreen, where only the sound of his voice remains, as if the reality of his existence has literally disappeared, crossing into mythological territory.  Action as we know it has ceased to exist, replaced by signs of a treacherous journey, riding horses, climbing mountains, or crawling through challenging landscapes.  By then the pace of the film has slowed to a crawl, yet he persists, where it becomes apparent that what he’s pursuing exists only in dreams, long ago having lost any contact with reality.  Like Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), and Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), these are films that make extraordinary use of natural landscapes, where man’s quest across the wilderness gradually loses steam, where the context is altered over time, where the original reality vanishes into thin air while something new emerges, driven by a spiritual realm that is expressed in near hallucinogenic, dreamlike imagery.  His strength depleted from lack of food and water, Dinesen follows a stray dog in an interesting parallel to one of the last thoughts his daughter spoke, speaking of her desire to own a dog, one that would follow her everywhere.  Little could he suspect, that’s exactly what Dinesen becomes late into the film, blindly following every last trace of her, where the dog leads him into a mountain cave where he encounters an elderly witch (Ghita Nørby), whose pronouncements defy logic, making little sense initially, much like the witches riddle from Macbeth, but the moment resonates simply due to her mere presence, evoking unknowable mythological destinies.  “What is it that makes a life function and move forward?”  Like Alice down the rabbit hole, where it all leads is a spiral into an inexplicably mysterious abyss, coming out on the other side where a completely new world exists in another time dimension, strangely connected to the original one, but curiously different.  In this case the end of the journey is back at the beginning, where it takes an exceptional determination and a willful plunge into the unknown to retrace those steps to board those same ships for another journey in search of El Dorado, where European prosperity is linked to this colonialist era of plundering the resources from distant nations.