Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Laura Citarella
Starring: Laura Paredes, Ezequiel Pierri, Rafael Spregelburd, Elisa Carricajo, Juliana Muras,
Verónica Llinás, Cecilia Romero
Where to begin with this one?! At four hours long, with multiple
narratives, genre inflections and timescales, Laura Citarella (what
a name) and Laura Paredes' Trenque Lauquen (Citarella
directs while Paredes co-writes and stars) is a hearty prospect -
sprawling doesn't begin to cover it. So, let's start with the film's first
sequence. In a conceit which acknowledges the film's literary
correlations, Trenque Lauquen is split into discrete,
non-linear chapters, and in this opening portion we meet Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd) and Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri), who are searching for missing
Laura (Paredes - I love the consistency of the name Laura, an early
indication of the film's coquettish nature).
Laura has gone missing, leaving a note: "Farewell, farewell. I'm leaving,
I'm leaving." The document's parallelism is mirrored by the duplicate of
men looking for her; Rafael her boyfriend and Ezequiel a colleague who
harbours, in this film which pulses with urgent romance, an inevitable
crush on Laura. In media res, we see the blokes wander about a parking lot
back lit by a fetchingly indigo evening light. Ezequiel is on the phone,
expositioning in rapid Spanish: of Rafael he says, "He doesn’t know
anything," duly setting the mien of this compellingly inscrutable film.
The men amble about, have a bit of a back and forth about coffee and where
to take the search next, before shooting off in a new direction guided
more by instinct and heart than hard logic; a vague destiny which may or
may not provide closure. Seemingly loose, we will come to realise that
this opening scene relays the eventual macrocosm of
Trenque Lauquen and its expansive ruminations upon narrative
imperative.
Throughout the film, Laura (Paredes is amazing, by the way - like our
besotted lads, we develop an instant fascination with her enigmatic
intelligence and open beauty) engages in similarly quixotic expeditions.
In flashback, she obsesses over letters secreted away in books within the
town library. The erotic epistolary details the affair between a teacher
and a smitten landowner – in fantasy chapters we see re-enactments of the
letter's contents wherein Paredes plays Carmen, underlining this film's
own mania for empowered, magnetic women. Or, to be more specific, it is
the concept of these women - along with the enthralling abstract mystery
of Carmen and the prized botanical specimens Laura is researching (which
lead her to the ambitious sci-fi experimentation of a mysterious couple) -
which beguiles in this film with its multiple meditations on human
impetus.
In Trenque Lauquen characters find meaning not in the
resolution of the quest but the journey itself. As Rafael continues to
look for Laura, clues and red herrings blur. We discover that she was a
columnist for a radio show, and we witness her investigating the eerie
associations of a local lake (the "round lagoon" of the title). But are
the visualisations of these scenes Rafael's imagining, or even the
subjective recount of Juliana (Juliana Muras), the radio host? In
Trenque Laquen it's the same difference, with a labyrinth narrative that
honours the mercurial imagination of the great Argentinian author Jorge
Luis Borges. Crucially, along with his reflexive, intricate storytelling,
Citarella and Paredes retain Borges' sense of humour and keen sense of
humanity, too. Midway through the film's first half, Ezequiel suggests
that the prize of "working out the enigma" is that you do it yourself,
alone. And thus, while Trenque Lauquen remains stubbornly
unfathomable, the warmth its characters create seduces us, nonetheless.
The tone may shift depending on the plot focus, and the depiction draws
upon different genre palettes, but Citarella and Paredes' storytelling
retains its genial clarity throughout.
Where we begin or end is ultimately an irrelevance in this story which
shuffles like a pack of cards. We watch and engage, and like the
characters, our intrinsic need for narrative resolution is enticed via the
filmmakers' masterful sleight of hand. A film about how we watch, and what
story might mean, Trenque Lauquen is a cinematic magic trick
which makes willing marks out of its rapt audience.
Trenque Lauquen is on MUBI UK now.