Jauja

Lisandro Alonso (Liverpool, Los Muertos, La libertad), a filmmaker loosely associated with the New Argentine Cinema movement, is known for making visually breathtaking pictures with meditative, minimalist narratives. His latest, Jauja, is his first period piece and his first film with an international movie star (Viggo Mortensen). It is also the first of his pictures that I’ve seen, so I can’t say how it stacks up against his five previous films.  Jauja left me underwhelmed despite the fact that I enjoy meditative, minimalist movies even when they are inscrutable. But Jauja feels like a cinematic exercise more than a movie--an experiment in ornate austerity. Mortensen plays a Danish military engineer during the Argentinian army’s 1870s Conquest of the Desert. When his teenage daughter takes off with a young soldier, the exasperated officer embarks on a quest to find her and bring her back. He traverses such a vast stretch of the endless, rocky Patagonian landscape, that he (and the audience) seem to loose all sense of time, space and reality.

This is the type of film that college and art-house audiences would flock to in years past, before our attention spans grew weary of committing to heady, existentialist cinema. But there are still plenty of filmmakers working in this powerful, expressionistic style. Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, Russia’s Julia Loktev, and America’s own Kelly Reichardt have made careers by challenging their audiences’ senses, sensibilities, and patience with films that, while on their surface seem ponderous and frustratingly austere, offer amazing insights if you can give yourself over to their meticulously crafted observations of detail and behavior. I gave myself willingly to Jauja, but it didn’t give me much in return.

I will say that the film’s visuals are impressive and occasionally possess a dryly absurdist whimsy. Alonso and cinematographer Timo Salminen photograph the film in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio with a rounded edge masking that gives the impression of a film negative’s border. This creates the sensation that we’re looking at a living 35mm slide, with all the rich, saturated color and sharp detail that format offered. The compositions in this film (which is shot on film) are often bewitching, but the content of these frames lack substance.  Likewise the editorial pacing lacks poetry. The sequences feel random. And the main character’s journey doesn’t seem to be a metaphor for anything. Why is this film set during the Conquest of the Desert and why is the main character Danish? Is this a film about European colonialism? If so I can’t see it. Why is he frantically searching for his daughter? Is this a film about male fears about female sexuality? Is it some kind of homage/counterpart to The Searchers? Again, I don’t think so. Perhaps it’s not meant to be anything more than a hallucinatory journey where we’re invited to take from the experience whatever we want, but if so, it seems a shame to go to all the trouble of making a film not to say anything in particular.  

Perhaps the key is in the picture’s title. Jauja refers to a mythical land of abundance, leisure, and pleasure. Like El Dorado or the Holy Grail, the object of this film may be something that can never actually be found yet the quest to discovered it instills passion and purpose in many. But this film is too slight and too pleased with itself to move an audience or stimulate much thought or discussion. Alonso seems happy to simply create striking images of a tiny man in a vast landscape and find inventive ways to inject humor into a sparse narrative. If I had been more swept away by these visuals, or delighted by the droll comedy, I might be willing to give Jauja another shot. The film’s uneven tone and its baffling conclusion don’t make me eager to take this trip again. I’ll certainly check out some of Alonso’s other films before shrugging him off. The director seems to want to be the next Andrei Tarkovsky or Alexander Sokurov, but, judging only by this movie, I'd say he's more of an imitator than an original.