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.

Los Muertos

Director Lisandro Alonso

 

LOS MUERTOS                    B

aka:  The Dead                       

Argentina  France  Netherlands  Switzerland  (78 mi)  2004  d:  Lisandro Alonso

Born in Buenos Aires, raised in the city but fascinated by the countryside, where he worked on his father’s ranch, Alonso studied at the Universidad del Cine (University of Cinema) in the early 90’s, but didn’t graduate, instead learned by being an assistant director to Nicolás Sarquís, an Argentinean filmmaker and screenwriter who made slow, near wordless films and also programmed the legendary Contracampo (reserved for innovative narrative forms) section of the Mar del Plata Film Festival, the only recognized competitive feature festival in Latin America, where Alonso’s job was to deliver film reels and transfer videotapes.  It was Sarquís who introduced Argentina to the films of directors like Kiarostami, Sokurov, and Tsai Ming-liang in the late 90’s before dying of lung cancer in 2003.  By then, Alonso had already released his first film, La Libertad (Freedom) in 2001, a low-budget film made for $50,000 from his family’s money, yet shot on 35 mm, as are all of Alonso’s films.  After spending a few years on land in the country purchased by his father, he was drawn by the less complicated lives, where people spent less time talking, yet were arguably more aware of the natural world around them.  With the director present at the screening, the first thing Alonso does before making a film is search for an interesting location, finding an excuse to film there, where his first film took him into Argentina’s Pampas region, literally immersing himself, bringing a sleeping bag and tent, living alongside locals in the region until he discovers a feature subject, essentially ignoring a traditional narrative.  The three films, La Libertad (Freedom) (2001), LOS MUERTOS (2004), and Liverpool (2008), comprise an aptly named Lonely Men Trilogy, as each examines 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, as 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.  Discovering non-professionals in their own environment, his films use long, contemplative takes to observe otherwise unknown and invisible characters in their own natural habitat, using experimental and abstract methods, establishing Alonso as one of the leading proponents of slow and contemplative cinema.      

Made three years later for only $29,000, LOS MUERTOS was shot in four weeks using the same crew as his first film, where Alonso’s idea to procure financing was to shoot an opening scene, then show it to prospective buyers in order to secure the needed financing to complete the film.  It took nearly nine months before they could begin shooting in the northern province of Corrientes where native people including the Guaraní were still living in the tropical jungle regions.  Traveling by canoe, he met the film’s subject, Argentino Vargas, while scouting locations, putting up his tent and staying with him for two or three days before asking if he’d want to be in a film.  By understanding that he’d get paid for work, the same as any other job, he agreed.  Opening with a mesmerizing slow burn through a dense jungle, where the camera acts as the eyes of the audience exploring the vicinity, which turns out to be a crime scene, as first one, then two bloodied bodies are seen sprawled on the ground.  Only a brief glimpse of the legs of the perpetrator along with a machete are seen in a portion of the frame before the entire screen fades to the color green.  The opening and closing shots are both spectacular, as is the accompanying sound design, but especially that virtuoso opening sequence, where cinema cohabitates with the outer reaches of the natural world, literally immersing viewers into the uniquely special terrain of the film, planosecuencia02 - Los muertos YouTube (3:39).  More happens in the first half of the film than the second, though little actually happens, almost all of it is wordless, as we watch a man sit, smoke, or drink maté out of a thermos.  Argentino Vargas is serving out his prison term in a work release camp without any mention to the previous images, though at some point we realize his lengthy prison sentence was for killing his younger brothers, and when he gets out, some twenty years after the crime, the film picks him up at the prison’s exit and follows him on his journey downriver to find his daughter, traveling down the Paranà River towards home, delivering a message en route to the family of a prison mate before borrowing their rowboat, where he keeps traveling further and further into the jungle, feeling a strange connection, or is it disconnection (?) to the lurking everpresent physical environment of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  What we discover is there was more regimen and purpose while he was in prison, that in freedom he finds himself disconnected to his former self and his life altogether, where one tends to fade in and out of various stages of consciousness while watching due to the hypnotic and somnambulistic quality of the film. 

Mostly dialogue free, silent and mysterious, it seems the director has a distinct interest in expanding the edges of human consciousness, using a very non-judgmental, explorative process, where film becomes an avenue for human interaction in regions where little is known, so he simply immerses himself in unknown terrain and waits to see what happens, capturing what he can on film, using only the barest traces of a story, where he’s more interested in finding people that he’d like to shoot, where certainly part of his unique approach to cinema is using an ambiguous style that is meant to be as unreadable as the characters themselves.  As poetically beautiful as it is disconcerting, the film brims with the richly somber mood and unmatched visual attentiveness that defines the director’s oeuvre, where a mysterious aura emanates from Vargas, just as it does from the inscrutable depths of the jungle, so that they meld together in a way that blurs the lines of the man’s identity.  There is a hugely disturbing scene, where Vargas first kills and then skins a goat that he finds onshore, that plays out in real time, but this stark reality amplifies the special skills it takes to survive in this environment, becoming something of a deeply contemplative analysis of the intersection of unflinching natural events with the actions produced by man’s haunting interior psyche.  Interestingly, the film sets up the narrative expectation of a quest in which Vargas will reunite with his daughter, only to thwart those expectations, much as a similar protagonist does in Liverpool (2008), as what his life amounts to are fragments searching to be a part of a whole, returning to the scene of the crime, trying to find out what’s left of his family, but none of these ends ever connect.  In the reverberations of his past actions that spread themselves out before him like invisible waves, a reference to a 2006 film by the same name from Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, he remains lost and displaced.  Screening at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, some have speculated that Vargas is a compulsive murderer who would end up killing his daughter after the film ends, where the end is hugely ambiguous, as after returning back to the region where it all began, nothing has changed after twenty years, where the final shot leaves viewers wondering what happens, as it’s all offscreen, leaving it to the audience to decide. But then an excellent music track plays out over the end credits, expressing more energetic vitality than anything we’ve seen in the film, which turns out to be Argentine punk band Flor Maleva (Malevolent Flower), offering an eerie vibe, and only then does the title pop up, Los Muertos in bold red lettering, giving it an incendiary and menacing effect, where if you weren’t thinking about it before, that and the ominous prevalence of machetes, the possibility that he might have returned to finish the job he started “before” he went to jail is a distinct possibility, yet to this wavering eye he seems perfectly innocent, but we'll never know what happened.  Richly abstract, the film plays out with a puzzling elusiveness, where the dream logic of the dazzling opening sequence continues to shroud the film in mystery.