Trenque Lauquen

 

Director Laura Citarella

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)

Performance

 

Nicolas Roeg

Roeg with Mick Jagger

James Fox rehearsing a scene

Mick Jagger with Anita Pallenberg

Pallenberg with Donald Cammell

PERFORMANCE                  B+                                                                                              Great Britain  (105 mi)  1970  d: Nicolas Roeg        co-director:  Donald Cammell

The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.             —Turner (Mick Jagger)

The most confounding film of its time, part of the 60’s psychedelic movie milieu, yet defying expectations of viewers, this rarely seen, small gem of a film is crazily indulgent and equally fascinating, now viewed as a cult film, filled with drug-induced attitudes and pseudo-philosophies of the 60’s that one might expect with Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger in a starring role, the first rock star to work with Roeg before David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Art Garfunkel in BAD TIMING (1980).  Roeg had previously understudied David Lean and worked exclusively as a cinematographer for François Truffaut in FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966), John Schlesinger in FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (1967), and Richard Lester in PETULIA (1968).  Taking viewers completely by surprise are some jaw-droppingly sadistic elements that may leave many scratching their heads in disgust, as the film really uglifies any remnants of a peaceful drug experience and instead shatters all illusions with grisly violence, heavily infiltrated by a toxic crime element, perhaps mirroring the ritualization of violence in the Hell’s Angels crashing the party at Altamant, culminating in a grotesque murder in the crowd while the Rolling Stones were performing onstage, as depicted in the Maysles Brothers Gimme Shelter (1970) released that same year.  Talk about a downer, this film is a glorified head case, an early proclamation announcing the end of the 60’s.  Written by Scottish painter turned screenwriter Donald Cammell, who was part of the London underground scene, and filmed by Nicolas Roeg, who provides the hallucinatory effects, they are indistinguishable collaborators on this film, often blending two or three shots into a single image, continually contrasting sharply defined images with free-form flashbacks, implementing a disjointed editing style while uniquely exploring identities, seen here as the merging and loss of individualism and gender.  Set in the waning days of the Swinging London era of 1968, defined by Twiggy, Carnaby Street, and the British Invasion, represented by films like John Schlesinger’s DARLING (1965), Karel Reisz’s MORGAN! (1966), or Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966), this delves into a shadowy, considerably seamier side of London, where the performers are James Fox as Chas Devlin, an ultra-violent and ambitious hired East End thug who is part of the protection racket of London gangsters, using threats and extreme violence to frighten and coerce people (Marlon Brando was initially considered for the role as a brash American), perhaps a precursor to Malcolm McDowell in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) without the cocky humor, while Mick Jagger plays Turner, a fallen rock star living a life of narcissistic seclusion, with the mesmerizing, often naked or semi-clad Anita Pallenberg as Pherber (the girlfriend of Keith Richards, and former girlfriend of Brian Jones, causing extreme jealousy, leading to Richard’s refusal to perform on the soundtrack) and equally mysterious Michèle Breton (who never made another film) as Lucy playing his ménage à trois bed partners.  Their paths cross and there is a struggle and transference of identity, two dissimilar men hiding under the same roof, with lots of explicit sex, drug use, and strange mind games, including a hallucinogenic experience that takes a turn for the worse, with subtle references, mysterious dialogue, and disorienting filming techniques, continually blurring the lines of reality.  In this film, nothing is what it seems, evolving into a psychedelic head-trip, shot with extreme emotional detachment, shown in an elliptical, non-linear style that simply drove studio bosses up the wall.  Completed in 1968, Warner Brothers, hoping to tap into the burgeoning youth market, was shocked by its frank depiction of drug use and what they described as pornographic sex, declaring the film “unreleasable,” so appalled by the results that the film sat on the shelves until 1970, unceremoniously released without a publicity tour, when it was almost universally vilified by critics, described by Richard Schickel for Time magazine as “The most disgusting, the most completely worthless film I have seen since I began reviewing.”  With Jagger signed on to play a lead role, the biggest rock star on the planet at the time, studio heads were drooling at the thought this might resemble Richard Lester’s playful use of the Beatles in A HARD DAYS NIGHT (1964), yet they couldn’t have been pleased with John Simon’s review in The New York Times, The Most Loathsome Film of All? - The New York Times, which reads, in part, “You do not have to be a drug addict, pederast, sadomasochist or nitwit to enjoy Performance, but being one or more of those things would help.”     

Film historian Colin MacCabe calls it the best British film ever made, listed at #7 in the Time Out magazine list of best British films of all time, Best British Movies | 100 Best British Films of All Time - Time Out, while in his 15-hour British documentary on the history of film, THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY (2011), Mark Cousins offers his view, “Performance was not only the greatest seventies film about identity, if any movie in the whole Story of Film should be compulsory viewing for filmmakers, maybe this is it.”  The grotesquely exaggerated, in-your-face style may be off-putting to some, using extreme close-ups, intrusive jump cuts, and repetitive sound bites to undermine any connection to character, with events shown out of sequence, using Moog-like sounds with bits and pieces of discordant melodies in a unique soundtrack designed by Jack Nitzsche, creating an imbalanced and distorted view that continually keeps viewers off-kilter, a jagged style that later became associated with Roeg, plunging viewers into a world of the unknown.  One might say there are two halves to this film, with the first more closely following Cammell’s script, predominately featuring the rollicking adventures of Chas, an enforcer in the protection racket run by Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon), forcibly shaking business owners down, instilling fear with open threats, while a parallel story is taking place in the courts describing how business mergers are profitable legal transactions, where the weaker are joined by stronger interests, which is better for both parties, claiming “Business is business and progress is progress.”  The sadistic nature of his work makes Chas a happy camper, a perfectionist right down to the smallest detail, relishing what he does for a living, a swaggering brute with a taste for rough sex and fancy clothes, specializing in extortion, allowing him to exhibit a supreme arrogance and haughty disregard of others, fast forward to Christian Bale in American Psycho (2000), which ruffles the feathers of Flowers a bit, as he has to constantly remind him who he’s working for, as he’s not in business for himself.  Anyone going into this film expecting to see Mick Jagger will be extremely disappointed in the first 45-minutes, as he’s nowhere to be found, bogged down by this brutally violent depiction of the criminal underworld, where Flowers has a habit of taking over struggling businesses, using muscle to apply pressure, where mocking and humiliating intimidation are his stock and trade, with Chas an exemplary, over-the-top example of one of his lieutenants exerting mafia-style tactics.  Flowers targets the small town betting operations of one of Chas’s childhood friends, Joey Maddox (Anthony Valentine), ordering Chas off the case, due to his close personal connection, but he decides to pay him a visit anyway, with Joey and his friends mocking Chas, convinced he is queer, with BDSM references littered throughout.  After receiving his fair share of abuse, however, he allows his temper to get the best of him and murders Maddox in a crime of passion, causing him to run not only from the police, but from Harry Flowers.  His quest for anonymity before escaping abroad and forging a new identity leads him to seek shelter in a temporary landing spot, the dilapidated basement residence of the Notting Hill home of Turner.  This second half of the film is infinitely more bewildering, turning into a cinematic puzzle piece that can be mind-blowingly cryptic and enigmatic, leading him into a crumbling labyrinth of candles, ornate mirrors, velvet drapes, and a squalid Bohemian vibe that he abhors, describing it over the phone with his proper Cockney accent, “It’s a right pisshole.  Longhairs, beatniks, free-love, foreigners...you name it!”  The pace of the film slows considerably, with no real storyline, becoming more of an underground or experimental film, where it’s mostly the blues guitar of Ry Cooder heard in the background, with no songs from the Rolling Stones, where Jagger’s role is actually to act, though the character he resembles is largely himself.  Nonetheless, he offers acute observations on this intruder that become the focal point near the end, with the two women swirling around him like sharks playing sexual mind games, questioning him on his motives, just who he is, and why he wants to be there, where their alluring beauty and frank sexuality is striking, while Jagger’s hovering presence oversees everything, like an omniscient force, but remains mystifying, creating a daring pathway into an inner sanctum of unexplored psychedelia.

While the 60’s American counterculture was largely influenced by the postwar Beat Generation, British Bohemian culture drew from older and wider literary influences.  Interspersed into the film are two Jorge Luis Borges readings, the Argentine short-story writer, essayist, and poet, and staunch critic of authoritarian rule, where his spirit hovers over the entire production, and his image emerges at a precipitous moment near the conclusion of the film.  Both Chas and Turner are shown reading Personal Anthology, the collection of stories published around the time it was filmed, while Turner mentions Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius during his initial encounter with Chas before reciting some material from it, and later reads a passage from The South out loud, “They would not have allowed such things to happen to me in the sanitarium, he thought” The South Lyrics | Beelyrics.net.  Adding to the myth surrounding this film, Donald Cammell put a gun to his head and shot himself years later in 1996, asking his wife to bring a mirror so he could watch himself die, where his last words reportedly were, “Can you see the picture of Borges?”  Mirrors help create the maze-like illusion in Jagger’s lair, where the layout is deliberately obscure, and the number of rooms uncertain, while Chas and Turner both alter their appearance as they go down the Rabbit hole, growing more curious, each recognizing an alter-ego in the other until eventually you can’t tell them apart, becoming spiritually fused together.  The actor James Fox first gained notoriety in Joseph Losey’s THE SERVANT (1963), another identity-crisis drama about mind games and sexual role reversals, while an androgynous gender fluidity became part of Mick Jagger and David Bowie’s rock star stage personas in the late 60’s.  Secretly fed psychedelic mushrooms by Pherber, a window into his soul is expressed through a shattered reality, as identities are dismantled and merged, becoming an assault on the senses with fractured visuals and a near impenetrable thematic motif, no longer able to discern reality from fantasy, challenging his macho posturing and repressed queer desires, offering nothing in the way of explanation or expository information, with a little esoterica thrown in as well, forcing viewers to find a way in, yet this is exactly what the directors had in mind.  “There is no truth, everything is permitted,” Turner explains to Chas, quoting Vladimir Bartol’s 1938 novel, Alamut, (Vladimir Bartol's “Alamut”), a historical novel that tells an Old Man and the Mountain story of Hassan-i Sabbah and the Hashshashin (Assassins) in Persia, who committed murders in hopes of gaining entrance to his hashish-laced Garden of Delights, full of rare flowers, strange perfumes, and exotic young women, a recurring image in the film and an allegorical story that so fascinated Beat writer William S. Burroughs that he included the reference in his 1959 post-modern novel, Naked Lunch (A Brief Note on Hassan I Sabbah, William S. Burroughs, and ...).  With Jagger riffing on an acoustic guitar, moving from a Robert Johnson blues lament, Robert Johnson - Come on in my Kitchen - YouTube (2:50), to John Lee Hooker, JOHN LEE HOOKER - BAD LIKE JESSE JAMES - YouTube (5:21), Roeg creates a visual kaleidoscope as he begins to get inside his guest’s head, his identity and aggressiveness undermined by drugs, with mirrors everywhere, as Pherber dresses him up in a wig before playing Merry Clayton’s Poor White Hound Dog, Performance (1970) -- (Movie Clip) Poor White Hound Dog YouTube (1:45).  The film juxtaposes two different models of British masculinity, the over aggressive street hoodlum of Chas and Jagger’s ambisexual rock star Turner, who moans that he’s been abandoned by his “inner demon,” leading directly into the centerpiece of the film, Jagger’s sarcastically mocking version of Memo from Turner, Performance (1970) -- (Movie Clip) Memo From Turner ... YouTube (3:42), a fantasy that ultimately ties everything together.  It’s a seismic shift that allows the two worlds to collide, leading to a finale where he’s driven off in a white Rolls Royce loaned by John Lennon, with the film remaining ambiguous to the core.  The peculiar strangeness of the Harry Flowers gang was a radical departure from any other cinematic version of gangsters, with homoerotic implications expressed through a fantasy-like delirium.  It might not surprise anyone that heroin was rampant on the set of the film, along with a cornucopia of drugs, while promiscuous sex was commonplace, with Cammell, whose career was never the same afterwards, allegedly encouraging drug use and sexual experimentation to create the proper mood.  Fox was so shaken by the role that he didn’t act again for an entire decade, instead becoming a born again Christian, while Anita Pallenberg stopped modeling and got further hooked on drugs.  The two halves were filmed so separately that she was completely surprised when she saw the gangster sections in the final cut.  Jagger’s girlfriend at the time was Marianne Faithfull, who remarked in her autobiography, the set was “a psychosexual laboratory…a seething cauldron of diabolical ingredients: drugs, incestuous sexual relationships, role reversals, art and life all whipped together into a bitch’s brew.”  Disturbed by the bad vibes, she quickly departed for Ireland.