Lisandro Alonso  (2014)

Early bird shows are so sparsely attended that lunchtime cinema visits are starting to remind me of Larkin’s Church Going – in particular, the poet’s wondering:

‘When churches fall completely out of use

What we shall turn them into …’

Curzon cinemas are being turned into chill-out centres.  When you book online at most of the London Curzons now, you get an e-ticket proclaiming ‘Next stop the bar!’ – as if the film you’re going to see is the pretext for a drink.   It may be different in the evening at Curzon Soho (although it wasn’t that different when I used to go there after work) but there are usually more bums on seats in the refreshment areas – people meeting other people or communing with their phones or tablets – than in the theatres.  The Renoir in Russell Square’s Brunswick Centre has now been extensively refurbished and re-launched as Curzon Bloomsbury:  on my first visit there late last month the social spaces were well populated but I was one of only three people watching Jauja.

The screens at Curzon Bloomsbury include the Bertha Dochouse which, according to its website, is ‘the UK’s first cinema dedicated solely to documentary films and events’ – so the first mystery of Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja is why it was being shown in the Dochouse.  The second mystery is the elevated position of the picture in the Sight and Sound films-of-the-year chart for 2014 – joint ninth, with Ida.  (Jauja also won the FIPRESCI prize in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section of last year’s Cannes festival.)  Of course, neither of these things is really a mystery, or even a surprise.   The pandemic carelessness of outfits like Curzon and BFI explains the first (administrative competence is considered philistine).  And it’s a safe bet that many professional cineastes will be impressed by Alonso’s film.  Jauja currently has a 91% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes although the critics’ consensus summary at least carries a helpful warning:  ‘Jauja will prove haunting for those lured in by its deliberate pace and lovely visuals, though it may test some viewers’ patience’.

Lisandro Alonso is Argentinian, Jauja‘s star, Viggo Mortensen, is Danish, and the dialogue, by Alonso and Fabian Casas, is spoken in both Danish and Spanish.   Most of the story takes place in the second half of the nineteenth century, in South American terrain almost as deserted as the Bertha Dochouse.  There’s a relatively short epilogue in what appears to be present-day Denmark.  But stating time and place so baldly misrepresents the intentional elusiveness of the film:  according to the IMDB plot synopsis, ‘A father and daughter journey from Denmark to an unknown desert that exists in a realm beyond the confines of civilization’.  The father (Mortensen) is Captain Gunnar Dinesen, a military officer and engineer who is working with the Argentine army in the settlement of Patagonia and in conflict with the indigenous people of the area.  The daughter is fifteen year old Ingeborg (Viilbjork Malling Agger), whom her father has, for reasons unclear, brought along with him.  Jauja is an actual place and was the capital of Spanish Peru prior to the founding of Lima:  Wikipedia explains that the Spanish expression ‘país de Jauja’, literally ‘country of Jauja’, is used figuratively to mean ‘never never land’ or ‘land of milk and honey’.  Legends on the screen at the start of the film describe Jauja as an alleged utopia that people kept trying to find but never did – they always lost their way en route.

Jauja begins with a conversation between Dinesen and Ingeborg, who says she would very much like a dog and asks her father why she can’t have one.  He replies by first asking what sort of dog she would like.  After a pause (the first of many), she gives her answer.  She doesn’t want, for example, a big dog or a brown dog or a friendly dog or a Pomeranian; she wants a dog ‘that will follow me everywhere’.  Dinesen promises she’ll have one when they return to Denmark.  It’s pretty clear this conversation will prove to be significant in what follows and, as a piece of writing, it certainly anticipates later exchanges in Jauja:  there isn’t a huge amount of dialogue but, when the characters do speak, they can’t resist speaking fancy.  Ingeborg runs away with Porto (Diego Roman), a young Argentine soldier.  Peeling back his shirt as they prepare to make love, she is fascinated by a mark on Porto’s shoulder and asks if it hurts.  He tells her it’s a birthmark, to which Ingeborg replies, ‘It’s like a constellation … or a falling star’.  You realise it’s a Cloud Atlas-type birthmark (the one in Cloud Atlas was comet-shaped) even before Ingeborg tells Porto, ‘I feel we know each other from another time’, or words to that effect.  Porto is murdered – mortally wounded by the brutal local warlord Zuluaga (Gabriel Marquez) and finished off by the distraught Dinesen, who thinks the soldier has done away with his daughter.  During his increasingly despairing and eventually fruitless search for Ingeborg, Dinesen encounters an Irish wolfhound wandering around a barren, rocky hillside.  On its shoulder, the dog has a sore (probably in the shape of Sirius).  The animal leads Dinesen to ‘Woman in the cave’, as she’s listed in the IMDB cast.  The woman (Ghita Norby) asks Dinesen about his past life.  He tells her that his wife left him and his daughter, when Ingeborg was a young child.  The woman asks what the wife was like and Dinesen describes her as ‘… quite tall – and beautiful’.  You hope he might leave it at that but you hope in vain.  His wife, he goes on, was ‘… achingly beautiful – like a carnivorous plant that comes out only at night, focusing all its energy on the insect it would devour’.

I’m making a sarcastic meal of the dialogue and I realise that admirers of Jauja regard the words Alonso has written as unimportant beside the images that he and his DoP Timo Salminen have created.  I gather that Alonso’s previous movies have been virtually wordless and think Jauja, his sixth feature, would have been a stronger film if it too had kept schtum.  Although I suspect the meanings of Alonso’s images are very limited, there’s no denying that he and Salminen bring out of the landscape a remarkable variety of textures.   But the clumsy language that the characters speak, by giving the metaphysical game away, detracts from the mysterious possibilities of the visuals – and, since there is dialogue, how can it be ignored?  Jauja is slow cinema, which means, for example, that you can drop off while Dinesen is approaching on horseback from the back of the frame and come to again even before he’s reached the foreground.  When his horse is stolen, it therefore raises the prospect of even slower cinema:  it’s a relief that, from this point onwards, Alonso largely abandons the device of protracted progress from the background.  But he sometimes uses the reverse journey – man and horse recede into the far distance.  Human beings pass through this harsh, indifferent country and, when they disappear, nature continues unaltered by their transient presence in it.  We get the point – repeatedly.  This is an example of what I mean by the limited meanings of the images but, by holding a shot for several minutes, Alonso encourages the viewer to think there must be much to see in it.

Following Catch Me Daddy, this is the second drama to be released in Britain within the last couple of months with a storyline inspired by The Searchers – although, for this filmgoer (and in spite of Dinesen’s being a not unusual Danish name), the inflexible European protagonist’s travails in an alien land brought to mind not John Ford but Karen Blixen’s nom de plume and Out of Africa.  Viggo Mortensen is much more agreeable company than John Wayne in The Searchers but there were times in Jauja when I had to keep myself amused by imagining how Wayne would have reacted to the increasingly surreal happenings in Alonso’s film.  (‘What the hell!?’ … in fact, that is what Mortensen says when he comes across the wolfhound with the wounded shoulder.)  Although the move from existential landscape into existential dialogue is a mistake and Ghita Norby, in her hat and wig, looks dressed up to be a character in a movie, I enjoyed Dinesen’s meeting with cave-woman.  Norby not only livens things up briefly; she also supplies Viggo Mortensen, for nearly the only time in Jauja, with someone to play off.  And some of what Dinesen says at this point – when he seems to confuse the identities of the old woman and his daughter – is more interesting than the rest.  The meshing of realistic and oneiric aspects of the story works in this instance.  (Alone and deprived of food and water for some time, Dinesen would likely become mentally disoriented.)   I’m not sure how Dinesen’s presence and quest in Patagonia connect with the film’s opening definition of Jauja – how the process of trying to find his daughter corresponds to the search for a ‘never-never land’.  Unless, that is, the father in this relationship is the one who wants his child not to grow up (he’s more likely the dog that follows her everywhere).  Ingeborg is the only woman in evidence most of the time and there’s an early sequence in which Pittaluga (Adrian Fondari), an Argentinian solider older and more boorish than Porto, is shown bathing in a pond and masturbating as he does so.  The suspicious eye observing this, from a distance, is Dinesen’s:  one assumes, at least in retrospect, that Pittaluga is fantasising about Ingeborg – or at least that Dinesen thinks he is.  When she disappears, her father believes that she’s been abducted.  In fact, she deserts Dinesen of her own accord to go off with the younger soldier.

The last part of Jauja sees the young actress who plays Ingeborg waking in a bed.  She’s wearing the night clothes of a twenty-first century teenager.  Was all the stuff in Patagonia this Danish girl’s dream – or is she a reincarnation of Ingeborg or at least a descendant of Dinesen?   Her father, we learn, is currently away from home.  The only other person in evidence in the grounds of the place is a man who looks after the girl’s several Irish wolfhounds.  It comes as no surprise that one of the dogs has the same open wound as its human and canine precursors in the Patagonian story although the dog handler (Brian Patterson) says the animal’s shoulder is responding well to medication.  Having let the injured dog wander off (why?), the girl notices in the grass a little toy soldier – the same object Dinesen came upon, after Porto’s death, during his fruitless search for Ingeborg.  By now, the characters have very little to say and, as a result, Alonso is able to revive somewhat the film’s sense of mystery.  Like A O Scott in his New York Times review, I noticed the ‘rounded-off corners of the almost-square frames’ that Alonso favours.  Scott is right to say that these ‘evoke early movies and antique photographs’ but doesn’t suggest how this effect links with anything else in the film.  Plenty of intelligent people, when they don’t understand something, are nervous of deriding it and anxious to spot whatever they can that might suggest they did understand.  Jauja is a good example of the phenomenon.

23 April 2015