As in all his films, Lisandro Alonso you need your audience to recalibrate their attention span. Eureka, with Viggo Mortensenit’s like a meditation on the global condition of indigenous peoples.
Lisandro Alonso presented all his films at Cannes. And his last work, Eurekain competition last year in the Un certain aware section, debuts this Thursday, with special screenings, and at the Sala Lugones, together with a retrospective of the director of Freedom.
Eureka It was hard work, interrupted by the Covid pandemic, and with filming in Spain, Portugal, Mexico and the United States, but the Argentine managed to film this sort of triptych and featured the performances of his unconditional Viggo Mortensen. Chiara Mastroianni.
We said that they are three stories that somehow come together. The first, and most successful, has a square frame (type Jauja, his previous film also with Mortensen), is in black and white and is a western. The actor of the saga The Lord of the Rings It consists of a man who arrives, on occasion, in a small town, looking for information on his missing daughter. Between gunshots, prostitutes and an enigmatic character called Maya, known as The Colonel (and played by Chiara Mastroianni), the plot unfolds, which reserves a surprise at the end of the story, which obviously we will not reveal.
Viggo Mortensen in the first of the “Eureka” stories, a western shot in black and white. Photo: LATEThen Eureka He enters much drier terrain, if that’s possible, when he jumps into a reservation in South Dakota, of the Oglala Lakota, part of the Sioux nation.
The third part, set in Brazil, and in other times, is more difficult to follow: it is 1971 and the Indians participate in the search for gold while being treated with contempt by white men. Here Alonso sets his imagination in motion with the bird that illustrates the poster of his film, with allegories and surrealism
“Time is an invention of men, only space is real,” says one of the characters Eureka. And so, the three stories that somehow intertwine the native peoples unfold with the excellent lights of the director of photography Timo Salminen, with whom he had also worked in Jauja and usually illuminates the films of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki.
Chiara Mastroianni plays two characters in the new film by the director of “Libertà”.Fascinating and disconcerting
What is disconcerting is the irregularity of the final assembly. Alonso is a filmmaker who manages the timing of the story, perhaps sparingly or simply as dead time because he lets the scenes flow, as in the second story.
And there isn’t much that serves as an amalgam between the three plots, apart from the fact that it has indigenous populations at its center (in the western Murphy -Mortensen- is not indigenous, but the gaze is on him) and may even you think that the first is a prologue, and the third, the epilogue.
The whole film is like taking a strange journey into the unknown.
“Eureka”
Drama. Argentina / France / Portugal, 2023. 147′, SAM 13. From: Lisandro Alonso. With: Chiara Mastroianni, Viggo Mortensen, Alaina Clifford, Sadie Lapointe, Adanilo. Rooms: Sala Leopoldo Lugones, Cinépolis Recoleta, Showcase Belgrano and in the interior of the town.
Source: Clarin
