Trenque Lauquen (2022) There’s Something Big Happening in Argentina (Review)

There’s something big happening in Argentina – operative word big. El Pampero Cine is a collective who have made an international name for themselves making movies that are experimental, local and personal, yet which shun the modest scale of most films which can be so described. Their most ambitious production to date is La flor, an 808-minute epic directed by Mariano Llinás. Compared to that, Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen displays a new, punchy, disciplined approach – it’s a mere four and a half hours. It’s also well worth exploring, and this new Blu-Ray from Radiance Films should swell its rapidly-building cult following even further.

Opening with a gorgeous long shot of the Argentine plains, Trenque Lauquen is a film about the environment in every sense – about society, about ecology, about the way we interpret the world and all its enigmas. If that sounds a bit heady, it’s also a mystery about a missing woman. Our investigators, at least at the start of the film, are two men linked by their affection for the absent Laura. The older, white-bearded Rafael suggests the younger, red-bearded Chicho has the best shot at finding her, because they worked together at the council. Chicho then clarifies he worked at the council and he knew Laura, but not at the same time. Rafael responds with a perfectly-timed, bathetic “Ah”.

As detectives go, then, they’re no Sherlocks. But then they’re not the detectives we follow for the whole film. After the frame story of their quest for Laura has been established, we slip into the first of the film’s flashback scenes and meet Laura herself, played by the film’s co-writer Laura Paredes. Laura is reading a second-hand book called Autobiography of a Sexually Liberated Woman when she finds a love letter dated 1962 sandwiched between two stuck-together pages. The strange discovery sends her down a rabbit-hole, trying to piece together the lives of two long-forgotten lovers through their correspondence. It involves some highly unexpected tangents: “The thing is, this is where the bees come into it…”

As with Laura’s investigation, so it is with Laura’s film. Trenque Lauquen is a magnificently digressive film – with a run-time like that, you might say it had better be, but I’ve seen longer films that are much more linear. These days we all have: most box-set television series aspire towards filmic status without getting anywhere near the truly cinematic visual possibilities explored here. By the mid-point, Citarella is cutting between so many different time frames, visual styles and storylines that you wonder if the film can possibly gather all its disparate elements back together to deliver a conclusion in a mere two hours. It spoils nothing to say that the ending of Trenque Lauquen explains everything and nothing: while there are some answers and plenty of satisfaction, it also strongly implies that Laura, Rafael and Chicho have accidentally opened the door to bigger, weirder, even science-fictional questions.

I say “imply” – Gabriel Chwojnik’s score is characterised much of the film’s second half by a swooping theremin, as if this was a 1950s B-movie. There’ll always be some who call a film like this pretentious, if only because it’s frowned upon to exhibit this much ambition without having a guaranteed audience. (It should be celebrated as the highest form of artistic courage, but anyway) Yet Citarella’s film is too funny and knowingly silly to deserve that label. The second half – Trenque Lauquen was presented cinematically as two parts, a division preserved by this double-disc set – opens with Laura as the science correspondent on a tacky radio talk show called ‘A Sea of News’, whose horrendous theme tune adds a layer of media satire to the film. It’s also a film about men and women, and the way they frequently occupy parallel universes: the same space, but incompatible takes on reality.

Pynchonesque, baggy, and intoxicated with insoluble mysteries, Trenque Lauquen can be interpreted as a film about conspiracy theorising. Its personal brand of paranoia is far from the algorithm-driven outrage-bait of modern online conspiracy culture, though. This is an old-school paranoid fiction, a film for people who dream of poring through the secret rooms in libraries, a deeply stoned film that doesn’t mind if your thoughts drift during its gargantuan run-time – this mental unmooring is, after all, exactly what the film is about. Like any fiction that deals honestly with conspiracy culture, it becomes about storytelling: what is most conspiracy theorising but a mass collaborative fiction project? As Chicho drives through the featureless countryside, listening to a song whose lyrics prompt the film’s next chapter title, there is a sense that the story is telling itself. But this is an illusion. No piece of work this remarkable is achieved without effort.

The extras include a booklet including critical writing, as well as a piece where Rafa’s actor Rafael Spregelburd discusses acting in this unique project. (It’s a very literary cast) There are also interviews, including the two Lauras, and one of Citarella’s short films, made in collaboration with the Japanese singer-songwriter Eiko Ishibashi. There are answers and insights to be found here, but the overall feeling is of a film that’ll never surrender all of its mysteries. You end up wanting to watch it all over again with fresh eyes, which certainly isn’t what you expect when you first clock the run-time.

Graham’s Archive – Trenque Lauquen