Jau­ja

A man ambles across a large­ly bar­ren land­scape in search of some unknown des­tiny. This short descrip­tion of Lisan­dro Alonso’s lat­est fea­ture, Jau­ja, would also fill in for every one of his pre­vi­ous four, span­ning from 2001’s La Lib­er­tad through to 2008’s Liv­er­pool, sug­gest­ing an artist who is unique­ly attract­ed to lone, pri­mal strug­gles against the sub­lime indif­fer­ence of the nat­ur­al world. These inti­mate, inchoate jour­neys trans­late as cos­mic alle­gories for the vari­ety and mys­tery of human exis­tence. They often tap anthro­po­log­i­cal depths, less cel­e­bra­tions of coarse man­hood and more exam­i­na­tions of what it means to be a man.

A teenage girl (Viil­b­jørk Malling Agger) asks that her father, Cap­tain Dine­sen (Vig­go Mortensen), buy her a pup­py, one that will fol­low her wher­ev­er she goes. He says he’ll con­sid­er it when they return to their native Den­mark, as they’re cur­rent­ly way­laid on a tor­tur­ous expe­di­tion in South­ern Argenti­na. Though Alon­so rigs the nar­ra­tive so inter­pre­ta­tion remains flu­id through­out, one could read Jau­ja as a sim­ple philo­soph­i­cal expres­sion of a dog blind­ly fol­low­ing the girl, Inge­borg, as she flees with a secret lover into the wilds of Patag­o­nia. This film is a reimag­in­ing of ​‘Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land’ where the white rab­bit leads the way to a dread waste­land of tin­pot can­ni­bal over­lords, fetid bogs, dream caves and ter­rains whose for­mu­la­tion and topog­ra­phy appear to open­ly mock those who attempt to con­quer them.

Call it cal­cu­lat­ed cau­tion, but the beau­ty of this film comes from its patent refusal to say what it is and what it’s about, result­ing in a per­pet­u­al sense of renewed intrigue and a con­stant hunger for the frag­ments of sto­ry to neat­ly inter­lock. In a world divest­ed of con­ven­tion­al mean­ing, banal objects such as a toy sol­dier or a mangy mutt some­how become vital totems of sig­nif­i­cance even though it’s nev­er cer­tain how or why.

The film is shot by Aki Kaurismäki’s reg­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Timo Salmi­nen in boxy 1:33 aspect ratio with the cor­ners of the frame curved to sug­gest ear­ly pho­tog­ra­phy tests redo­lent of the story’s 19^th cen­tu­ry set­ting. There are two or three shots in which the cam­era moves, but Dinesen’s trek is cap­tured most­ly through sta­t­ic, fas­tid­i­ous­ly com­posed tableaux in which he trudges from one edge of the frame to the oth­er and via a vari­ety of obscure angles and vantages.

Though there are vague sug­ges­tions that Dine­sen may have died, may be dream­ing or is pos­si­bly even the embod­i­ment of some­one else’s dream, Jau­ja is a film that recog­nis­es that all of the above pos­si­bil­i­ties con­sti­tute the essence of what cin­e­ma is. A com­po­si­tion, the plac­ing of a cam­era or the depth of the focus can sud­den­ly trans­form a gor­geous vista into a remote nightmare.

A genius per­for­mance by Mortensen sees him not only ful­ly com­mit to the log­ic and man­ners of a ​“real” time and place in his­to­ry, but there retains an omnipresent glim­mer – like a shim­mer­ing star in the night sky – that he’s also ful­ly aware of this fan­ci­ful and eccen­tric tri­al by cinema.