The increasingly ballooning runtimes of auteurist projects — specially made by those who belong to the ever-expanding School of Slow Cinema — inspire more anxiety than curiosity. In part, for our own sanity: there’s always the fear that we may not come out of one of these awake (or alive). But, in larger part, for subsequent critical pieces that champion the auteur for further increasing shot and film duration because it displays the cultural capital they’ve gained in the industry. It doesn’t matter that sitting with the most miserable characters, who have told us everything about the film’s (and the world’s) miseries 25 minutes into a 155-minute runtime, feels interminable. It’s indulgent individuality — so apparently, it qualifies as great.
But this isn’t a review of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011). Rather, we’re talking about Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka, a much better, at times, hauntingly mysterious film, though one hamstrung by similar issues of auteurist bloat. The Argentinian director’s previous films — La Libertad, Liverpool, and Jauja, all of which premiered in or out of competition at Cannes in 2001, 2008, and 2014, respectively — gained recognition for their slow cinema aesthetics (long takes, increasingly distant, still shots) but all ran under 110 minutes. Eureka is the director’s longest film yet, clocking in at 147 minutes and feeling more like a 200-minute-long epic. But it’s also his most ambitious and audacious — from a narrative, thematic, and stylistic POV — which works hard to justify the increased duration.
Alonso describes the film’s focus in concretely specific terms: it’s about “the Indigenous communities of north, south, and central America.” But his storytelling is anything but that. He structures Eureka’s narrative as an unevenly organized anthology comprising three interconnected (or not?) stories centered around Indigenous people in three different parts of America at three points in time. No title cards appear to separate one world from another — just sublime and startling moments of transition — from black-and-white to color to, again, color, from classical academy ratio (1.33:1) to 1.85:1 to 1.66:1, transporting us from one space and time to another and to another other. It’s up to us, then, to compare and contrast these disparate stories’ jarring and rhyming rhythms to mine meaning, feeling, or both.
The first two stories in Eureka manage to both encourage meaning and elicit feeling beautifully. Theoretically, they’re dialectical: if the first one, merely 23 minutes long, is, in equal parts, an homage and critique of a classical Hollywood Western like The Searchers (1956), starring Viggo Mortensen as the John Wayne-esque cowboy who very image overshadows the Indigenous people and their place in the land upon which all of his precisely stylized, mindlessly violent action is taking place, then the second story is everything but that. It’s Alonso’s patented cinema of inaction for 60 minutes, entirely divorced from the mythic Western Hero and committedly focused on the lives of a Native Indian cop, Alaina (Alaina Clifford), and her niece, Sadie (Sadie LaPointe), in the present-day Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. And yet, it doesn’t feel all that different from the first story. Indigenous characters in both these narratives “disappear” — consumed by the cowboy’s presence in the Western narrative, and then by their own haunted selves in the present-day story. This sobering isolation and exhaustion — meticulously detailed by Alonso’s choice to spend time with them working and wandering through a frosty American landscape that seems, at best, indifferent and, at worst, hostile — offers more than insight: it’s an emotionally bruising reminder of how space and time inherit, not exonerate, erasure and violence.
The film’s third story, which makes up the remaining 64 minutes, communicates the same thing, but unfortunately not nearly as movingly. Unlike the first two parts of this triptych, this story, now set in the Amazonian forest in the mid-1970s, feels like it very much exists on its own as a sub-Apichatpong Weerasethakul mysticism piece that, over time, becomes a coldly brutal colonialist parable in the vein of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God. It’s, again, fascinating in theory and style: Alonso’s extensive use of slow dissolves, in particular, effectively blur the seemingly idyllic dream world of the Natives with the cut-throat opportunism of Brazilian colonizers. But, in execution, it feels merely additional, not additive: a needless elongation of an excellent 83-minute film into a murkier 147-minute one in order to adhere to, as we’re left to assume given the imbalance is establishes and the way the sum deviates from previous Alonso features, some arbitrary rules of the auterist “next film.” It’s not a fatal flaw for a director this talented and a film otherwise this impressive, but the protraction is a frustrating way to see things off.
DIRECTOR: Lisandro Alonso; CAST: Viggo Mortensen, Chiara Mastroianni, Rafi Pitts, Luisa Cruz; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement; IN THEATERS: September 20; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 27 min.
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