2023-11-12 21:29:15
by Paolo Mereghetti
Argentine director Laura Citarella surprises with a work lasting over four hours, divided into two parts
In the meantime, some instructions for use. The title: Trenque Lauquen is an Argentine town 440 kilometers south-west of Buenos Aires, the home town of the director’s parents whose name in the Mapuche language means “round lagoon” and indicates the lake around which she grew up the city. Duration: the film is divided into two parts which last 129 and 132 minutes respectively and which are screened together, divided by a “reinforced” interval.
Having completed these minimal explanatory tasks, we can move on to talking about the film, one of the best surprises of this season, which had already won the applause of the public at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, in the Orizzonti section. And surprise it really is because «Trenque Lauquen» by Laura Citarella is a film that escapes any definition and cataloguing, surprising like all the products of El Pampero Cine, the group to which the director belongs, unfortunately little or not known at all in Italy .
At the beginning, we understand that the two characters in the field – Rafa (Rafael Spregelburd) and Ezequiel known as Chicho (Ezequiel Pierri) – are trying to find out what happened to a certain Laura (Laura Paredes), who had moved from the capital to Trenque Lauquen to finish a job cataloging the local flora with which he could get a place at university. Rafa, a university professor and tutor for Laura, is also her boyfriend, and is anxious to get to the bottom of this disappearance; Chicho, on the other hand, from whom Laura had also asked to borrow the car which she later abandoned, seems less worried about her disappearance. Or at least he seems more dazed, more dazed (a French critic, Mathieu Macheret, compared him to the cartoon Droopy, eternally out of phase but always in the right place at the right time, and the comparison is rather spot on). He took Laura around the fields where she recorded flowers and plants.
But after these first scenes which are intended to be, by explicit admission of the director, a homage to Antonioni’s «Avventura» (but we also add to «Vertigine» by Otto Preminger, whose missing protagonist was precisely called Laura), here the film begins to take unexpected paths. The screenplay (by the director and Laura Paredes) does not follow chronological linearity but opens up and frays into many different streams. Almost as if we were in a “cubist” film, the direction first addresses one perspective and then abandons it in favor of another and then another. Or perhaps it would be better to mention the thousand articulations of a new library of Babel (it is no coincidence that Borges is one of the fetish authors of Pampero Cine) or even the wealth of inventions of a nineteenth-century feuilleton, written however by a great novelist, such as Hugo or Dumas .
And the viewer is quickly captured by these thousand possible developments in the story: what is the relationship between Rafa and Laura? Why does Chicho know more than he seems to want to say? And what was Laura really doing in Trenque Lauquen? Who were her friends? Why had he decided to have a weekly column on the local radio LU 11? What was he looking for in the library? Mixing contemporary scenes with others from the past, live dialogues, voice-overs and conversations on the radio, going back in time and space (there are also scenes filmed in Italy), introducing unexpected characters, mixing passionate love stories with sudden glimpses science fiction (what is that which comes out of the lagoon one day?) Laura Citarella dismantles what we are used to expecting from a film to take us outside of every norm.
In the end everything will find its own reason (even if the ending multiplies the question marks instead of giving them answers) but the fascination of this way of making cinema is such that in the end it is inevitable to get caught up in the pleasure, abandoning yourself to the flow of a story that digresses and then retraces its steps. Always ready to surprise.
November 12, 2023 (modified November 12, 2023 | 8:32 pm)
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