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| Director Laura Citarella |
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| Citarella with Laura Paredes |
TRENQUE LAUQUEN A- 93 Argentina Germany (262 mi) 2022 d: Laura Citarella
Academia doesn’t prepare you for sadness. —Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd)
A highly ambitious work, an immersion into a literary universe that you’d swear was adapted from a novel, as it plays out that way onscreen, filled with a long and rambling, nonlinear narrative style of storytelling, screening in two parts, not sure why, apparently a distribution issue, as according to the director it is meant to be seen in one viewing, where unlike Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Pt’s I and II (2019, 2021), each half does not stand alone, featuring stories within stories and flashbacks within flashbacks, where the heart of the journey set in and around the Argentinean city of Trenque Lauquen (Round Lake in the Mapuche language) remains elusive, as it plays out like a mystery novel. The film feels completely original, though it’s not so much about what happens, but how, accentuating the clever ways the story unravels, centered around various secrets and revelations, becoming larger and even stranger than we could have imagined. Listed at #1 on Cahiers du Cinéma: Top Ten Films of 2023, and #2 on Sight & Sound Poll: Erika Balsom: Best Films of 2023, the film is told in 12 chapter headings over the course of four and a half hours, with only a handful of featured characters, yet there’s something uniquely captivating about this sprawling epic, reminiscent, perhaps, of Jane Campion’s 7-episode, made for TV miniseries 2013 Top Ten List #9 Top of the Lake, but this feels much more abstract and experimental, lingering longer with each character, adding a more meditative element. One of the co-founders of the independent film collective El Pampero Cine, including Mariano Llinás, Alejo Moguillansky, Agustin Mendilaharzu, and Citarella herself, where the members collaborate and work on each other’s films, owning their own equipment, refusing to apply for state funds, making low-budget films, with Citarella part of a collective that makes puzzle films, moving through a variety of genres and styles, alternating from verbose exchanges to deep silences, following a Latin American tradition of Argentinean filmmakers like Lucrecia Martel, Pablo Trapero, and Lisandro Alonso that can often feel undramatic, but intense, offering a sense of adventure and mystery with a literary twist, where it is as much about storytelling as it is filmmaking. Citarella served as a producer on the 13-hour episodic film LA FLOR (2018), ten years in the making, the longest film in the history of Argentine cinema, where the director Mariano Llinás was Citarella’s professor at the Universidad del Cine film school in Buenos Aires, describing his student as “proactive and fearless.” Having grown up in the municipality of Trenque Lauquen, with the camera sensually exploring various locations there, including a recurring image of the sign that leads into town, Citarella has crafted a different kind of love story that is at times a detective caper, comedy thriller, sci-fi mystery, and romance, evolving into something completely unexpected in the second half, yet even then remains a mystery throughout. It’s literally a puzzle piece, a box of unexplained clues, morphing from one idea to the next, where each individual viewer may get a different take on what they believe is happening, evoking a continual sense of curiosity, where there’s something undefinable that continually stands out, as seeing and listening are essential components to this unique cinematic experience, where every revelation gives birth to a new mystery, each narrative engenders a new narrative, very close to Wojciech Has’ THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT (1965) and Raúl Ruiz’s MYSTERIES OF LISBON (2010), whose films were both adapted from literary classics. Despite the extensive length of the film, there is no easy resolution, with a shift towards an increasingly somber atmosphere, growing more contemplative near the end, where embracing the mystery is an end in itself.
Six years in the making, arguably a sequel to her earlier film OSTENDE (2011), continuing the exploration of female subjectivity through the same protagonist, also called Laura, where the director’s goal may be to realize “a series of films in which the same figure leads different lives in different cities in the province of Buenos Aires,” as it stars and was co-written by Laura Paredes, the partner of Mariano Llinás who also played one of the main characters in LA FLOR, with both Paredes and Citarella experiencing pregnancies while writing the film, with the issue of motherhood becoming a key element, offering a distinct women’s perspective. Appropriately, then, the film opens with two bewildered men searching for a missing woman named Laura (Laura Paredes), obviously inspired by Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960), while Otto Preminger’s film noir Laura (1944) also begins with a missing Laura, all sharing the same hidden obsession, with both men apparently in love with her, yet each intentionally conceals their own private thoughts and personal motives from the other while only sharing the obvious details of the search. The older boyfriend Rafael (playwright and director Rafael Spregelburd) seems to take charge, having professionally been her professor at a university in Buenos Aires, as Laura was a botany student recently engaged to the professor, who is still holding a position open for her there, aided by a stoic local driver named Ezequiel (Citarella’s husband Ezequiel Pierri, also a producer), a Trenque Lauquen city hall coworker who transports her to her field research assignments, having recently grown very close, both men withholding essential truths, rivals vying for the affection of the same woman. At first everything seems linear and unambiguous, but the more we learn, the less we know. When Laura disappears without a trace, leaving Ezequiel’s borrowed car at a gas station, both men have unanswered questions, following up on various leads and clues, featuring plenty of conjecture and speculation, where everyone seems to hold a different idea of her, but it gets them nowhere, leaving viewers equally baffled, feeling as if she’s a mirage, but never really suspecting foul play, yet the prevailing sentiment is that there’s more to the story that we’re not seeing, where it may be that these two men are incapable of seeing that their own shortcomings may actually be the cause for her disappearance. In other words, they may not be reliable observers, as they only see things through a self-serving male filter, which comprises the first half of the film. It’s only after we ditch these two guys that the film shifts to Laura’s perspective, finding ourselves in flashback mode, as we begin to realize that she’s the real star of the show, as Laura, too, is an investigator, where the basis of her investigation is identifying and classifying plants, discovering a new species of flower, while also preparing for her radio show on emancipated yet forgotten historical women, turning into a completely different mindset, where it’s more about her curiosity, with the film continually probing underneath the surface, seeing what she sees, feeling what she feels, where nothing is ever shown directly. In something of a parallel story, she and Ezequiel share another secret, becoming obsessed with researching another woman who disappeared fifty years earlier, whose correspondence Laura only recently discovered carefully hidden in dozens of books found in the city library, informing him, “I think I’ve become the only witness of a little mystery.” Digging this up, like an archaeological expedition, forms the heart of the picture, a story with long flashbacks or time jumps that are configured as the present, where it’s the journey itself that matters, as the answers may not be as fulfilling or as satisfying as the search, where the entire film may be read as a mysterious existential odyssey for some unnamed personal objective.
In David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS (1990), the question continually posed is “Who killed Laura Palmer?” while here it is simply “Where is Laura?” At one point, a woman raises the question, “What makes you think that Laura wants to be found?” According to the director, much of the impetus for the film comes from Virginia Woolf’s 1929 novel A Room of One’s Own, a comment on women’s lack of free expression, concluding “I much prefer this idea of women weaving a web to that of a ‘feminine’ spirit existing as an impermeable thing.” Amplifying that idea is Laura’s discovery of erotic letters by the mostly hidden identity of Carmen Zuna (played by the director, with Pierri as her lover) dating back to the 1960’s, initially found hidden in a copy of The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman by the revolutionary Russian feminist writer Alexandra Kollontai in the mid 20’s. It’s only after the men fade away that new alliances and new enigmas appear, including a mythological discovery of some unclassifiable mutant, perhaps even an amphibious child (we never set eyes on it) found in the town’s lake, which is secretly cared for by a lesbian couple, Elisa (Elisa Carricajo) and Romina (Verónica Llinás, Mariano’s sister), and kept out of sight in a locked room of their house, literally altering our perception of the rational world, another example of the extraordinary use of cinema to use fiction to shape reality. Essentially a road movie that delves into psychological states of mind, with multiple stops along the way, each one more mysterious than the next, there are exemplary choices of music that mirror those mental states, like the Sergio Leone spaghetti Western--sounding Trenque Lauquen Soundtrack OST YouTube (8:16) composed by Gabriel Chwojnik, but also the recurring song Los Caminos YouTube (2:06) by Miro y su Fabulosa Orquesta, a song Ezequiel frequently listens to while driving, sounding a bit like a Spanish-speaking Lou Reed, or the celebratory folk anthems of Violeta Parra’s Si Te Hallas Arrepentido YouTube (2:18), who was part of the progressive movement of the Communist Party in Chile, while Laura’s ringtone in both this film and OSTENDE (2011) plays Elvis Presley’s Suspicious Minds, Elvis Presley - Suspicious Minds (Official Music Video) YouTube (3:54). While paying homage to Argentine literary traditions, with its expansive Jorge Luis Borges-style storytelling, what we ultimately discover is finding liberation in being lost, where that may be the intended desire, to literally let go of all things familiar and seek an entirely new path, where the road to the horizon is seemingly limitless, resembling that final sequence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), where freedom in this case is in the disappearance, like Homer’s The Odyssey or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, finally open to all of life’s possibilities, with a desire for adventure and emancipation, examining the sensation of feeling incomplete, something we’ve all experienced at some point, allowing new instincts to be utilized and explored, which are essential for personal growth. Using a series of slow and meandering long shots captured by Agustín Mendilaharzu, where the aspect ratio stretches to widescreen in the final sequences, this is a film of collected stories, each one containing a kernel of truth that feels ambiguously open to interpretation, with no clear and rational explanation, yet somehow it all comes back to Laura Paredes, who has an unusually strong screen presence throughout the entire film, as we continually wonder what’s driving her in an apparent quest for personal freedom, making this a decidedly feminist work. As the film delves into futuristic, sci-fi possibilities, incorporating historical and fantastical elements, the real mystery is that nothing is ever resolved, where the desires and motivations of Citarella’s women are an unknown even to themselves, that life remains an enigma which is more often than not misunderstood, with very few directors having the courage of conviction to make a film as fearless as this, essentially a manifesto of a new form of artistic language, an expression of a cinematic ideology based on great formal freedom, literally embracing the inherent mysteries of life, treading into territory previously explored in transcendent films by Jacques Rivette in Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau) (1974) and Claire Denis in The Intruder (L’intrus) (2004).
TRENQUE LAUQUEN (LAURA CITARELLA, 2022) ENG ... entire film in Spanish with an English subtitle option on Vk Video (4:21:50)
