‘Eureka’
Director: Lisandro Alonso
Starring: Alaina Clifford, Sadie LaPointe, Chiara Mastroianni, Viggo Mortensen
Year: 2023
Premiere: June 14, 2024
★★★★
The first feature film Lisandro Alonso in nine years it is his most ambitious work to datesomething like an odyssey through time, space and the mind that works like deconstruction of the western In two ways. Through it, from the outset, the Argentine explores the state of the indigenous people of America, their traumatic history and their distorted representation in films. And meanwhile, also, destroys the structural conventions of the genre through narrative disruptions with which Alonso evokes the elliptical climax of his previous film, ‘Jauja’ (2014), radical transformations of certain characters, strange visual rhymes and a general conceptual elasticity that perhaps alludes to a history of oppression that has no end.
The first segment of ‘Eureka’ is a parody visit to the cinematic Old West; the second adopts the director’s typical minimalist and observational style to observe life on a Sioux reservation, and, while contemplating a tribe that inhabits the Brazilian jungle in the 70s, the third carries out a foray into the realm of magic. Over the course of the three, the film will undoubtedly provoke rejection from those who do not tune in with its sedative rhythm and its elusive logicand will seduce the rest thanks to its director’s ability to make even the most antidramatic scenes hypnotic, and to compose the type of images that are not easily forgotten.
