Trenque Lauquen review – com­pul­sive and com­plete­ly absorbing

Cin­e­ma, by its design, is obsessed with inti­mate, present tense emo­tion. What is hap­pen­ing to a per­son now, and how are they react­ing to it? The cos­set­ed, con­ven­tion­al shape of films doesn’t tend to allow the explo­ration of slow change over time, or grand arcs which have been catal­ysed by some­thing unfore­seen or unfath­omable. Lau­ra Citarella’s extra­or­di­nary, nov­el­is­tic new fea­ture, Trenque Lauquen, stretch­es its nar­ra­tive lux­u­ri­ant­ly, yet eco­nom­i­cal­ly, across 260 min­utes to tell the sim­ple sto­ry of a woman who has the audac­i­ty to change her mind.

The film opens on the news that a char­ac­ter named Lau­ra (Lau­ra Pare­des, who also co-wrote the film with Citarel­la) is miss­ing, and that’s just the first of many sub­tle over­laps with David Lynch’s bucol­ic meta soap opera, Twin Peaks. Through a series of rec­ol­lec­tions from Laura’s spurned lover, we track her efforts to untan­gle a tor­tured fling that occurred in the past, all of which is detailed via a cache of love let­ters that have been art­ful­ly con­cealed between the pages of books from the local library.

With the verve of a mas­ter clas­si­cal sto­ry­teller, Citarel­la stages the unfold­ing of this eccen­tric mys­tery while pro­cess­ing the dizzy­ing flow of infor­ma­tion with a grace and pre­ci­sion that will have you hang­ing on every frame. It’s com­pul­sive and com­plete­ly absorb­ing, and Laura’s ded­i­ca­tion to this ad hoc inves­ti­ga­tion which may have no con­clu­sion is echoed in a per­for­mance that empa­thet­i­cal­ly rede­fines tired cin­e­mat­ic notions of obses­sive behaviour.

The film states: just because a woman is blind to your roman­tic over­tures, that doesn’t mean there’s some­thing wrong with her, as Laura’s sud­den pur­pose for hokey archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­ery takes prece­dence in her own love life. Laura’s day job is as a local radio host whose slot is ded­i­cat­ed to arcane fem­i­nist icons, and through her dai­ly tra­vails we see that she’s trans­form­ing into one of her own subjects.

Laura’s where­abouts are tied to the con­clu­sion of this mys­tery, and so there’s a sense of dri­ving towards a mas­sive, mid-film reveal. And that’s when things piv­ot into a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent, sci-fi-shad­ed space that wouldn’t have been out of place in an episode of spooky ​’90s ser­i­al, The X‑Files. The details of the sto­ry are less impor­tant than the fact that the film is about the spe­cif­ic lev­el of empow­er­ment that women should have to trans­fer their per­son­al labours else­where, and at a moment’s notice.

There are cer­tain­ly ele­ments of sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty in this sto­ry which relate to love sto­ries that with­er at the point you think they’re about the blos­som, but what’s most mov­ing and rad­i­cal about the film is its deci­sion to frame the dra­ma and emo­tion of some­one opt­ing to sud­den­ly change the course of their life with such com­mit­ment and inge­nu­ity. Citarel­la is an inte­gral part of an Argen­tinean film­mak­ing col­lec­tive called El Pam­pero Cine who were respon­si­ble for 2018’s 808-minute La Flor, itself a work which employed extreme dura­tion as a way to empha­sise the vibran­cy and vari­ety of life to those will­ing to smash the reset button.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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