New York Film Festival 2023

[Chris Knipp]

LISANDRO ALONSO: EUREKA (2023)


IMAGE FROM LISANDRO ALONSO'S EUREKA

TRAILER

Three stories of indigenous people, at different times and places

With VIggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni in the first section, featured in the neutral Premieres category at Cannes (not making it into Competition there), this is a bit of a puzzler. Though each of the segments is interesting - or contains interesting - and suspenseful - elements, it's hard to figure out how they connect, which they seem to be meant to do, since each one merges into the one that follows.

"The Argentine slow-cinema formalist explores tensions between Indigenous culture and the modern world in a languid curio that will delight his acolytes and bemuse others," write Guy Lodge in Variety at Cannes. A review by Savina Petkova for Playlist, perhaps best states the case when she says "there’s too much" here "to make it really work." But it's exciting to try, and I like this better than his much admired last film and find much to admire in it.

Lisandro Alonso's 2005 Los Muertos is one of my favorite Latin American films, favorite films ever seen in a film festival, so I have enormous respect for this director and know the power he wields. Los Muertos is a film that is almost wordless. It;s perhaps right to say that here, in this new film, Alonso has too much going on. It's the opposite of Los Muertos, which is one man, no dialogue, no score, just a camera and a jungle journey to a violent finale whose meaning we understand without explanation. I was disappointed by Alonso's more mainstream (but also quaintly formatted) 2004 Jauja, his last film and his biggest "hit" so far. It was accomplished and that academy ratio format with curved edges gave it an art house elegance, but it lacked his earlier edge.

The opening of Eureka is oddball and amusing. It's rough-hewn black and white Western opening with a scrawny, ancient Native American delivering a thrilling cry to the elements; then featuring Viggo Mortensen as a lonely traveler çalled Murphy, whom others seem to have it in for, searching for his kidnapped daughter: he is dumped off a coach by a surly driver dressed like a nun. They speak English, anachronistically, since it's the nineteenth century and she talks about having to get to her kid." In a saloon, Chiara Mastroianni - you won't see this again - sits down with him and says he can call her "El Coronel". Apparently, she runs the unruly town. There's something of the off-key air to this stylized Western passage of Jum Jarmusch's Dead Man, without being quite as authentic or as brilliantly weird. Then the camera pulls away to reveal a big boxy TV with the last image on the screen: hey presto! We've been watching a TV movie.

What follows at first features a Native American girl called Sadie (Sadie Lapointe), neice of Alaina (Alaina Clifford), a Native American cop in the Pine Ridge Reservation. We follow Alaina around as she carries out bureaucratic white people police duties like arresting a (pregnant, 15-year-old, drunk) Native American girl fighting with a knife, and rescuing a stranded European motorist called Maya (Mastroianni again). Alonso plays with the slow-cinema possibilities of cop routine, the calls back dnd forth to HQ - where Alaina apparently disappears after going to the casino to investigate the remains of a brawl.

This artfully segues into Sadie going to the station/jail to visit her brother, whom she seeks to motivate. She first appears as a basketball player and coach, and seems full of energy and hope. But she goes to her granddad, and reveals she wants him to carry out a promise he made to her long ago: she wants, it seems, to disappear, or to fly away in the soul of a giant stork. Mays's question to Alaina about teenage suicide may have been gauche, but desperation reigns even among the apparently motivated, on this American Indian reservation.

That's it for North America and we're transported to the Amazon basin, where the bird-soul flies, and an earlier time again, where Indigenous Brazilian natives read each other’s dreams and one of them, banished by stabbing someone in a knife fight, goes to work foraging for gold, meeting his own bizarre fate witnessed by the giant bird.

This is all magnificent, especially the haunting passage of the cop on the reservation, and it's beautifully photographed by Timo Salminen (an Aki Kaurismaki collaborator) and Mauro Herce Mira, and fluidly edited, by choice flowing seamlessly like an acid trip instad of neatly separated into chapters.

But either way, flowing or in chapters, these segments are hard to digest in one two-and-a-half-hours film. It did not seem long to me, only confusing, a piece of work of high polish with an interesting cast, both famous and unknown, a film that you can write a nice essay about but that's hard to wrap your head around, and hard to recommend to anybody but challenge-seekers or dyed-in-the-wool Lisandro Alonso fetishists. But if you are one of those two, for God's sake see this whenever you get the chance.

Eureka, 140 mins., debuted in Premieres at Cannes May 2023; also shown in festivals at Munich; Wroclaw, Poland; Lima; Melbourne; Busan; and the New York Film Festival, as part of which is was screened for this review Oct. 10, 2023. Metacritic rating: incomplete, including only one review so far. NYFF: Oct. 10 & 11, 2023, Q&A with Lisandro Alonso, Alaina Clifford, Sadie Lapointe; N.American premiere.