Slow, slow, slow. That is the word, the descriptor, that has been repeated over and over in reviews of Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso’s masterpiece, reoccurring with fevered intensity even in those most positive of responses, and usually attached to a warning that the audience will need to recalibrate their expectations. That they will need to surrender to the obscure intentions of the director – that they will need to somehow fortify themselves. Read enough of these pieces and you might start to believe that a critic really is nothing more than the compiler of a consumer guide, his or her sole purpose simply to mark the inefficiencies that set a product apart from a desirable factory standard, a poet of ‘bang for your buck’ – deeply disturbed by fluctuations in spec.
In reality, Eureka is a film of incident. Patient and rich with detail perhaps, but not empty of action and not without a great deal of momentum. Indeed, it features three complete if elliptical narratives in two-and-a-half hours, itself a rare and even dignified success in an era when most films of a supposedly more mainstream-friendly style fail to tell one within the same time-frame. Alonso is certainly not moving here at the pace of Tsai Ming-Liang’s infamous Buddhist monk ‘Walker’ and the reduction of storied traditions of magical realism in South American art to simple ‘barminess’ (another common theme) reveals the reactionary limitations of most of our broadsheet critics.
We begin in an ambiguous Old West, shot in monochrome and resonating with the same existential absurdism as Jarmusch’s Dead Man. A postmodern space, perhaps, but also a rather startling recasting of the frontier town as hell itself, the air full of constant alternating bursts of gunshots popping like fireworks and devilish folk music from the old countries. The streets lined with corpses and outdoor copulations. Viewers of Alonso’s previous work might feel a sense of déjà vu when Viggo Mortensen’s gunslinger arrives to seek out his missing daughter and finds his search challenged by El Coronel, a matriarchal Madam played by Chiara Mastroianni, as this is essentially a restaging or extension of Alonso’s last film, 2014’s Jauja, complete with the same stars as father and daughter. But then we are pulled out of this strand, this dream of a film that is both made and yet-to-be-made (if we are to assume that the actress played by Mastroianni briefly in this second segment, researching a role in an upcoming Western, is preparing to play El Coronel) and placed in present-day South Dakota, on an Native American reservation decaying and emptying in the grip of economic devastation and the methamphetamine/opioid crisis.
For over an hour we follow Alaina Clifford as a police officer who, in the course of her night breaking up domestic disputes and taking in drunk drivers, appears to be the only law enforcement working in the county (before she too enigmatically vanishes) and Sadie Lapointe as a barely post-adolescent basketball coach who has become something of the guardian angel to the remaining youngsters on the reservation but is growing increasingly hopeless. A startling turn then allows us to travel with a transmuted Sadie to the Amazon in the 1970s, where a young member of an indigenous tribe is caught up in a love triangle and then banished. He finds work in a semi-legal gold prospecting camp, before he flees from potential thieves and general exploitation to cross the river and leave the jungle.
The effect is hypnotic, enveloping, a triumph of cinema that rejects the traditional conventions of drama, that moves beyond the time-collapses of the modernist novel and utilizes directly the history of the medium to forge something it is impossible to imagine existing in any other form.
Alonso’s concerns are not at all obscurantist or difficult to discern: his theme is that of exploitation, his interest lying in the manifold ways that indigenous peoples have been savaged by white settlers and the systems of oppression and victimization that they have installed in their ‘new worlds’. Where perhaps the struggle arises for certain audiences is in the lack of direct didacticism; there is dialogue that comments upon these concepts, but there are no monologues, no tippings-of-the-hat to the discourses of social media that have bled into the wider culture and which demand the cast-iron, explicit and almost academic (re)-stating’s of one’s position and perspective with every development (this director recognises that he is making a film, not penning the abstract of a research thesis).
Alonso wants us to observe and to feel: he is methodical in the way that he allows things simply to unfold, to suggest through a merging of the mundane and the supernatural, and the intermingling of petty frustrations and historical abuses. A pain that is deeply personal and part of a wider global despair, an ongoing disenfranchisement and destruction that echoes back-and-forth through the centuries. “Space, not time,” remarks Sadie’s grandfather to her as she asks to begin her own migration. “Time is a lie told by men.”
What appears at first to be the ‘fantastical’ passage across historical periods, an artistic formulae perhaps half-inched from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is then revealed as the acknowledgment of a Bergsonian perpetual present, a wide-open plain on which these crimes are being continually committed and within which the characters – the people – can appear and disappear at will, transform and mutate (or even transcend, if we are to give some of the happenings their most optimistic readings). The effect is hypnotic, enveloping, a triumph of cinema that rejects the traditional conventions of drama, that moves beyond the time-collapses of the modernist novel and utilizes directly both the history of the medium (its popular genre tropes, the developments of the aesthetics of the arthouses, thus the contents of its myths) and the very particular and complex possible relations of the movement-image and the time-image that we understand from Delueze to forge something it is impossible to imagine existing in any other form.
The work undertaken is humane, but avoids entirely the pitfalls of the schematic ‘humanist’ issue movie turned out by today’s Stanley Kramers or the Flaherty-derived ethnographic documentary. This is one of the films of the year: haunting and final, but never closed, always open, a world and a dreamtime reflected and refracted. Please, I beg you, don’t miss Eureka.
Eureka is playing at Selected Cinemas Nationwide via Sovereign Films
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