Discovered at the San Sebastián festival and at the Rencontres Cinélatino in Toulouse, Laura Citarella’s film will be released this Wednesday, May 3 in theaters in France. Trenque-Lauquen is a kind of UFO, like the water tower that appears repeatedly in the film. Six years of filming, four hours of film and four hours of investigation, back and forth between past and present, carried out at full speed. When the Argentine pampas, reputed to be so monotonous, become a fantastic fictional territory.
The first images of the film: two men at a gas station in the middle of nowhere in the early morning. One monologue on the phone, the other seems to wonder what he’s doing there… And for a good ten minutes, we – the viewer – are lost. Rafael and Ezequiel, the only two male characters in the film, are looking for Laura. We understand this as the film, divided into two parts of six chapters each, progresses. Rafael, Laura’s life companion, and Ezequiel, Chicho, her investigation companion, drive through fields and towns: Trenque Lauquen, Fortín Olivarría, América, Piedritas… names that smell of deep Argentina , of pulqueria at a service station, drawing like a spider’s web in which Laura is perhaps hidden. Small towns that seem extraordinarily banal with their checkerboard plan and their small low houses. The palm trees in the public squares break up the horizontality of the landscape, so flat that it seems infinite.
Orchids and love letters
The story keeps moving forward and backward. The film is built on loops that reinforce the musical illustration with this recurring ballad, La canción de los caminos (The song of the paths), Viennese waltzes, or even this lagoon which gave its name to Trenque lauquen (round lagoon in the Mapuche language), the round bellies of Carmen Zuna then of Elisa, pregnant… curls that thwart the infinity of horizon. At the turn of one of these loops, we will understand that Laura, who enters the film in the second chapter, is a biologist, a specialist in orchids. The young woman came to the area to make an inventory of these plants, and she is missing one (“ a pendant “) as it often lacks a key to understanding all the mysteries of this film. Of the ” intentional omissions “explains the director, it is up to the viewer to fill in the holes in the canvas. When she’s not looking for orchids (it’s her first quest in the film), Laura, played by Laura Paredes, actress and co-screenwriter of the film, takes part in a radio program in which she recounts the lives of women with destinies outside the commmon. From the medieval Lady Godiva to the contemporary Alexandra Kollontaï. For this, she skims – and dusts off – the shelves of the municipal library. Hidden in the pages of a book by the Russian politician, she discovers a letter.
This letter is the first link in the second investigation, which she will lead, still with Ezequiel, a character as reserved and gentle as Laura is bubbly and bubbly, while Rafael is in the image of the ” porteño seen by provincials: sure of himself, a tad arrogant and macho. The different chapters of the film adopt the points of view of the multiple characters who enter into the loop of the story, like a ball from which several of them are pulling the threads. The last chapter being that of Laura. Apart from the two men mentioned above, the film features a gallery of female characters – the film also won the grand prize for best fiction feature film at the Créteil Women’s Film Festival. Strong, caring and loving women like Juliana, the director of the radio program, like Elisa and Romina who take care of the “ lagoon monster (at the heart of Laura’s third investigation), or the owner of the pulqueria who feeds and warms the wandering young woman. Women who weave a protective web around Laura. They are like those characters that Laura evokes in her radio program, like Lady Godiva who sacrificed her modesty to save her subjects from being strangled by the taxes imposed on them by Leofric, her lord husband. Women who also disappear, like Laura herself, like Carmen Zuna, the author of the mysterious love letters, like Elisa and Romina.
Jigsaw game
In search of an elsewhere or of themselves. They leave on foot, alone, in the pampas. The occupation of Argentine territory – the epic poem Martin Fierro is invoked in the film – by these immigrants from Europe, like the family of the director herself from northern Italy, is hollow in history. Of the ” Peregrinas de las pampas », Pilgrims from the pampa, a term that sounds strange as it is rarely used in the feminine in French. You have to let yourself go in the twists and turns of the story, in the puzzle game, often funny and tender – like listening to the ” Laura’s confession on the radio, addressed to Ezequiel and Juliana, but also to us, spectators. Puzzle game and cinema: an assumed bias of deconstruction of the story, which blurs the codes – is it an adventure film, a film noir, a science fiction film? A moving film that opens doors and never closes them, a “mutant” film, announce the producers, like Laura who, during her wanderings, covers herself with the clothes of strangers, and perhaps also of the mysterious monster of the lagoon…
Pampero cine (PC)make cinema differently
Laura Citarella, the director, was one of the founders of the collective Pampero Cinemawho made a name for himself on this side of the Atlantic with the film-fleuve The flor. A cooperative-style collective where everyone pitches in: Mariano Llinás, the director of the Flower and co-founder of PC is also credited with writing and editing Trenque-Lauquen, as well as Alejo Moguillansky, another director of the collective; Agustin Mendilaharzu, also a founding member, is the director of photography there; the actor Ezequiel Pierri (all the actors have kept their real first name in the film, moreover, Laura Citarrella, who has worked with Laura Paredes several times, considers her a sort of fictional double) is co-producer. Two of the actresses of The Flower are in Trenque Lauquen, Laura Paredes and Elisa Carricajo, the film’s mysterious doctor. They belong to the theater company Piel de lava, who often works with PC developers. When cinema is also a tribal story! About Pampero Cinema : make films differently, get out of the classic production and distribution circuits, self-produce to break formats, allow life to fertilize cinema and therefore give free rein to the film desires of its members. Productions in which we find recurring themes, dear to these directors: the province of Buenos Aires to which both Mariano Llinás and Laura Citarella express their attachment, stories about books or notebooks (Borgès is never well far), of fields, roads and paths… There is moreover a sort of echo phenomenon between Historias extraordinarias of Llinás and Trenque-Lauquen. Of the productions by the Pampero Cine team, few have been seen in France (The flor And Historias extraordinarias); but the Cinélatino festival, always pioneering new cinema spaces, had honored in 2019.