This ambitious film by the Argentine director is divided into three parts but mostly takes place on an indigenous reservation in the United States. In the Premieres section.
The biggest challenge in the career of the director of THE DEAD and LIVERPOOLnine years after JAUJA, his latest film, is an ambitious yet minimalist portrait of life on a South Dakota Indian reservation told through the stories of a mother and daughter. But Alonso is not content with telling this extraordinary tale, but wraps it in a larger framework, which in some way leads one to think about the repercussions and parallels of this type of life in other spheres. eureka it is, in a way, three films in one, which connect and broaden their meanings, although they do not necessarily need each other.
The first of these films lasts just over half an hour of the 140 minutes that the film lasts. And it’s literally the call”movie within a movie». In black and white and in a square format reminiscent of JAUJAAlonso makes a western here in an irreverent style that is more original and ambitious, within his particular search arty, than what Pedro Almodóvar tried to do in his. Viggo Mortensen plays a man who has recently arrived in a decadent town in the West with the intention of finding out what has happened to his daughter (a recurring theme of the Alonso/Mortensen filmography) and there he meets aggressive, unpleasant and heavily drunk people who try to stop him. , including a mysterious character who calls himself The Colonel and played by Chiara Mastroianni. That story is a movie in itself.
I won’t explain how it connects to the next one – it’s a nice surprise – but once that story is finished the longest of the parts and the best of them all begins. It takes place on an Indian reservation in South Dakota and stars a policewoman and her niece, a twenty-something local basketball coach, nicknamed “Magic Johnson” by some. In a poor, cold and desolate place, the two try to get out of loneliness, anguish and emptiness. Alaina (Alaina Clifford) spends her time in her squad car dealing with everyday police matters: a drunken car, a family feud, people living in dire states of filth and decay. And she does it with a mixture of obligation, nobility and annoyance. Apparently without much help from her colleagues.
While she’s making her rounds, her niece Sadie (the extraordinaire Sadie Lapointe) isn’t having a good time. It’s just that the Pine Ridge Reservation where they live is a place with a lot of suicides and most of the young people her age have either left or are having a very bad time. Sadie has a series of meetings and conversations in which she will make it clear that there are few reasons that keep her wanting to be alive in the present. One of them is her connection to Alaina. The other is with her grandfather. But when those connections become complicated, the girl wonders if it’s not time to make some kind of decision. I don’t mean suicide but something else, well, you’ll see…
That gives rise to the third part of the film, one that has an air of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s cinema but is also connected to films by Alonso himself such as THE DEAD. For a while, it’s hard to readjust to starting a new story and a new plot with different characters after almost 100 minutes of film, but once you get over that discomfort, Alonso and his screenwriter Fabián Casas find a way to make it grow and connect with the the rest. In any case, apart from some striking special effects and certain beautiful and poetic moments, that part is the least convincing of the three, mostly because one has the impression that it is a type of film or format that both Alonso and other filmmakers they have worked before.
eureka integrates these three parts into a whole that tries to reflect the themes that are always handled in Alonso’s cinema: loneliness, the feeling of incomprehension of the world, mystery (here it is already cosmogony), travel and broken families trying to rebuild , most of the time without luck. The slightly fragile connection between the three stories makes the film offer different climates, intensities and logics. The first western can be seen as a nice diversion and the third part –which takes place, at least in fiction, in Brazil– as a somewhat more laborious closure of the issues that have already been opened, but I think that the secret of the film It is in the central part that occupies more than half of the story (it is a film in itself) and in which Alonso ventures into things that he had never done before.
I don’t just mean telling a story that has a lot of drama arty American independent cinema nor to deal with life inside the indigenous reservations, but to an attempt to narrate in a way that is closer, if you will, to the detective story, generating in the viewer a permanent feeling of anguish and even terror (with touches a la David Lynch) linked to the fate of this policewoman and her sweet and long-suffering niece in a depopulated, distressing and desolate place where no one seems to listen to anyone, where empty roads give the sensation of leading nowhere and where the one in which survival hangs by a thread, the one that unites us to what happens not only in the place where we live but in the entire planet.
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