VILLBJORK AGGER MALLING, VIGGO MORTENSEN IN JAUJA

In Patagonia, chasing a wayward daughter

Scott Foundas points out in his Variety review that Lisandro Alonso's new feature, a costume piece set in the 1880's, contains more dialogue in its first reel than all of his preceding four films, but there is still a great deal of aimless and wordless wandering around by Viggo Mortensen in the rocky Patagonian wilds. And the words actually distract us, but only temporarily, from a less powerful narrative structure than Alonso provides in his masterful and haunting Los Muertos. There's nothing more satisfying and neat than when a single final shot caps off a film without words. It happens in Daniel Schechter's recent film of Elmore Leonard's Life of Crime, and it happens in Los Muertos. Jauja has a lot of fancy stuff at the end, but it doesn't satisfy. It begins with a Danish military engineer called Gunnar Dinesen (a homage to the glamorous writer-adventurer Karen Blixen's pseudonym, perhaps ). He's all dressed up in a fancy cavalry dress uniform and has the rank of Captain and he's supervising an engineering probject involving deep trenches. There's a very dicey local lieutenant with him, Pittaluga (Adrián Fondari) -- when first seen he's sitting in a pond masturbating, and a young soldier, Corto -- who is going to run off with Dineson's daughter Ingborg (Viilbjørk Malling Agger). Dinesen says she's fourteen. She looks older; maybe it's the 19th-century clothing. What is she doing there? Obviously, waiting for trouble. Dineson seems uncomfortable with the Argentinian men, as well he might be. Their talk hints of a genocidal campaign by the local military against the aboriginal population, whom they call "cabezas de coco" ("coconut-heads").

Jauja is in a nearly square format (full-frame 4:3 aspect ratio) with curved corners, which reminded me of Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, a similarly formatted and similarly oddball avant-garde 19th-century western where people get lost. Meek's Cutoff has an ambiguous ending, but it does have an ending. I was hoping -- and it would have seemed Alonso-ish, and true to the way this film was going -- if Jauja had had a totally bleak ending à la Paul Bowles, where a white man winds up up shit's creek without a paddle, like the linguistics professor in "A Distant Episode" who is badly beaten and gets his tongue cut out and is chased away with tin cans tied to his ass. Instead Alonso settles for a fairy-tale meeting with an old Danish woman (Ghita Nørby) living in a cave (but we're still in Patagonia), with a mumbo-jumbo confab confusing whether the old lady is Dineson's mother or his daughter, and he's led there by a lean scruffy dog that rises from another pond, seen from behind and motionless, appearing like a sphinx. That's a stunning visual trick, and clearly Alonso and his dp (the Finn, Aki Kaurismäki's cameraman Timo Salminen) can do striking, sometimes gorgeous things with images here when they choose, apart from the forbidding, lunar beauty of the Patagonian landscape itself.

And then we inexplicably leap forward to the present day, to a totally different but pretty and summery landscape, a fabulous castle in Denmark World of Interiors must be drooling to do an article on, and a bedroom where a very pretty young girl (prettier than Dineson's daughter by a mile), waking up and going outside to the sun-dappled lawn and garden, finds a little toy soldier that had been in the hands of Ingeborg. What's it mean? You've got me. The only link between the Patagonia finale and the tacked-on Denmark one is dogs, and the toy. (A dog is probably Ingeborg's avatar; she asks for a dog in her first dialogue with her father.)

Jauja is a polarizing puzzle picture, a dazzler and a snooze young cinephiles and Alonzoites can enthuse over and debate the meaning of. For others it's just an annoying head-scratcher, a waste of 108 minutes of our time. Yes, maybe as Noel Murray said in his Dissolve summary, "Alonso’s style reaches new heights of sensory attentiveness and physicality" in Jauja, but this film's elaboration loses the magic and mermerizing storytelling the director achieved earlier with much simpler means. He seems in danger of the same hubris and hermeticism that have led astray that other young Latin American master, Carlos Reygadas. But fans of auteur boldness must watch each new film by either for the times when that doesn't happen and something amazing emerges. Even misfires are not to be missed.


JAUJA ACTUAL FORMAT

Jauja premiered in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Award. It’s also an official selection of the Toronto and New York Film Festivals. Screened for this review at the NYFF, where Alonso has been named this year's filmmaker in residence. Jauja will open theatrically in the US 20 March 2015 (limited); in the UK 10 April; in France 25 April. (Eventually the Metascore was 77%; the AlloCiné press rating 3.8, which is 76%, but that's a higher score in their scale.)

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(For my full coverage of the 2014 NYFF see also FILMLEAF.)

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.