New partial western release “Eureka”

Eureka review – booze, bird souls and Viggo Mortensen in barmy yet rich experimental enigma

The Guardian

By Peter Bradshaw

May 21, 2023

The Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso is back with another rewardingly weird journey into the unknown.

It is the custom now for everyone in the film business to describe filmmakers as “storytellers”. But even leaving aside the fact that so many film-makers are not very good at the old-fashioned business of storytelling, the fact is that cinema does not have to be about story, however uncommercial an idea that seems.

The Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso is a case in point: his work is challenging and opaque and taken an uncompromisingly andante pace and yes, it is probably destined to be shown at festivals. But it is also weirdly hypnotic and exalted and magnificent in its way, and often has nothing do with story. His last movie, with Viggo Mortensen, entitled Jauja, was a case in point. Now he has come to Cannes with his experimentally non-narrative meditation on the global condition of indigenous peoples. It is entirely fascinating, though undoubtedly it requires the audience to recalibrate their own consumption-tempo and attention span stamina.

We begin with an eerily slow black-and-white sequence which appears to be an old-fashioned western, with Viggo Mortensen playing some stranger arriving in a windblown American town in the Old West. From there we shift, in full colour, to a Native American reservation in the contemporary US, where a Native American police officer picks up an actor from that movie by the side of the road with car trouble. This same officer gives the actor a ride to a nearby school where her niece Sadie coaches basketball. Then she resumes her increasingly dreary workload: picking up a violent drunk with a knife and another drunk driver and attending to reports of a fistfight at a casino.

But she seems disinclined to answer her dispatcher’s calls for information and this dispatcher’s radio calls seem like wan calls into an empty void. Meanwhile, young Sadie, herself apparently tired of life, calls on her grandfather to give her a potion which will give her deliverance: a brew which causes her soul to change into a large bird which flies through time and space to the Brazilian jungle of the early 70s, where the member of some religious community kills someone in a knife fight and escapes to where gold is being prospected and meets his own strange destiny with the bird-soul as witness.

The entirely bizarre narrative or anti-narrative conveys nothing of the film’s dreamy effect, its prose-poetic procedure or its status as artwork. It’s a film which moves laterally away from its starting point and more or less ignores those Aristotelian unities of time and place that most films stick to. And the title is another enigmatic thing about it. There is certainly no obvious “eureka” moment of discovery or understanding. But there is a sort of sensory perception, a feeling that through drifting downstream along the river course of this film and gazing at the foliage on either bank, some progress of the soul is being achieved. It is an enriching experience.

Eureka

 

A 2022 Argentinian, French. German, Portuguese. Mexican, Netherlands co-production

     [4L (Buenos Aires), Luxbox (Paris), Komplizen Film (Berlin), Woo Films (Mexico

     City), Rosa Filmes (Portugal)), Fortuna Films (Lisbon)]

Producers: Andreas Roald, Jamal Zeinal Zade, Jasmine Zeinal-Zade, Carine Leblanc,

      Dan Wechsler, Marianne Slot, Karla Badillo, Maria Jose Cordova, Jonas Dornbach,

      Rafael Ley, Roberto Minervini, Denise Ping Lee, Hédi Zardi

Director: Lisandro Alonso

Story: Lisandro Alonso

Screenplay: Lisandro Alonso, Martín Caamaño, Fabian Casas

Cinematography: Mauro Herce, Timo Salminen [black & white]

Music: Domingo Cura

Running time: 140 minutes

 

Story: EUREKA highlights 4 different but connected stories with varying degrees of style & quality. One is a black & white western starring Viggo Mortensen playing a man named Murphy searches for his daughter after she is kidnapped by the outlaw Randall.

 

Cast:

Murphy - Viggo Mortensen (Viggo Mortensen Jr.)

Randall – Rafi Pitts

Receptionist – Santiago Fumagalli

Nun - Luísa Cruz

Prostitute - Natalia Ruiz

With: José María Yazpik, Chiara Mastroianni, Viilbjørk Malling Agger, Frank Cuadrrón

Stunt coordinators - Claudimar Guimaraes, Agnaldo Bueno

 Alaina is tired of being a police officer in the Pine Ridge Reservation, and decides to stop answering her radio. Her niece Sadie spends a long night waiting for her, to no avail. Hurt, she decides to begin her journey with the help of her grandfather: she will fly through time and space to South America, finally she will stop watching old black and white westerns that do not represent her in any way, and everything will feel different when she hears the dreams of other people, those who live in the forest. But there will be no definitive conclusions… Birds don’t talk to humans, yet if only we could understand them, they would surely have a few truths to tell us.

EUREKA highlights 4 different but connected stories with varying degrees of style & quality. The first two captivated me the most with a black & white western starring Viggo Mortensen & another following a female police officer during one eventful evening. Wish the other two could’ve measured up to these as the pacing and drama soon evaporated and left me feeling mixed overall.

Trailer film clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1XyXlSEQ_s