trenque lauquen (w&d citarella, w. laura paredes)

There’s a monster in Trenque, which the protagonist, Laura wants to see. She’s told she can’t see it, but she can listen to it. She strains at the door to hear, and what she hears, along with us, is the sound of the monster breathing. Which seems wholly appropriate for a film which relishes its capacity to breathe. Rather than being measured in minutes or story beats, it might be measure in breaths, the breaths the characters take as they try to work out what’s happening, and we take alongside them.

Trenque Lauquen has garnered critical plaudits and global recognition for Citarella. Its genesis as part of the Pampero stable is evident, with Llinas credited as a collaborator. At nearly five hours long, it is in the vein of Historias Minimas and La Flor, films where the director worked as a producer. All of which goes some way to explain the surefooted way her magnum opus handles the challenge of filling so much screen time so artfully. It’s almost as though a parallel version of cinema has been quietly evolving in the province of Buenos Aires, one which has no fear of taxing the audience’s attention span, something which is such a concern in other parts of the world. Because Trenque isn’t just long, it also revels in its longeurs, even down to the modes of dialogue, where the Pinteresque pause is employed to full and touching effect.

The film is divided into twelve parts, each of which has its own distinctive flavour, sometimes, as in Spregelburd’s part, defined by the acting, and sometimes defined by the mood. In her talk following the screening of Ostende, a film she said was shaped as a mash-up between Rohmer and Hitchcock, the director said that Trenque is a conversation with at least eight directors. Hitchcock might be there again, along with Antonioni, using the trope of the lady who vanishes, and the end felt as though it might be a nod to Varda’s Vagabonde. The multiplicity of influences and tones, another thing that more conventional filmmaking tends to be wary of, actually helps to define the aesthetic of Trenque Lauquen: it is many things at once, always predicated on a mystery. The mystery of the poetess, the mystery of the creature, the mystery of the missing protagonist. These hooks are enough to constantly engage the audience, and maintain the film’s rhythm: we’re not that bothered how long it takes, in fact, the drawn out nature of the quest if anything adds to our enjoyment. This is cinema operating like a sprawling novel, where the detours and distractions are part of the pleasure. 

las poetas visitan a juana bignozzi (dir. laura citarella, mercedes halfon)

The Poetesses visit Juana Bignozzi, to translate the title into English, is a lovingly crafted documentary co-helmed by Citarella with Halfon, a writer, poetess and critic. Halfon has been entrusted with the papers of the titular poetess, a formidable woman and a wonderful poet. The film offers a loving introduction to Bignozzi’s work, but more than this, it is also delightfully self-referential, asking the question of to what extent a film can ever truly represent a subject like poetry, or a poet(ess). The tension between directors is noted, with Citarella more preoccupied with these questions, whilst Halfon is engaged in the more prosaic task of paying homage to Bignozzi. There are two main areas where their approaches coincide. Firstly, with the more Bolañoesque elements of Bignozzi’s story: she spent thirty years living abroad, and the contents of this time in her life remain mysterious. She was married, but travelled extensively; in the dense forest of photographic memories left behind, many of the figures who appear are unknown and appear untraceable. There’s something of The Savage Detectives about all of this, as well as the spy narratives which Citarella loves: a fortuitous touch is the way that in a doc filmed about Bignozzi when she was still alive, there’s a sign which says in Spanish - From Russia with Love - outside the block of flats she lived in. Secondly, their approaches coincide in ultimately letting the poetry do the talking, (even if the director has to ask the question: which version of the reading is the best one to use? Is it better (more truthful) to get actors to read or not?). The final section of the film is given over entirely to the poems, although even here there’s a dialectic between sound and image, with the poems being presented both through being read and via the text itself appearing on screen. 

ostende (w&d laura citarella)

Ostende is a masterclass in how to make your debut. The film is predicated on the quiet charm of its protagonist, Laura Paredes. Staying at the eponymous off-season balneario, she observes what she believes is a conspiracy evolving between three of the other guests, an older man and two younger women. This gives the film a Hitchcockian guile, a hook to anchor the film’s quiet observations and gentle humour. As is so often the case with the films from the Pampero stable, there are elements of the shaggy dog story to the narrative. The journey is more important than the destination, even if this is to a certain extent belied by the film’s final sequence. The story Paredes constructs in her head about her fellow guests is echoed by a story for a film that one of the hotel staff tells her, a tale that promises darkness, violence and mystery, but is no more than a first act. The presence of a John Le Carré book which Paredes is reading reinforces the idea that the audience is watching a spy movie, searching for clues along with the protagonist. But the film also makes it clear that in this sense the cinematic thriller is a game, played between audience and director. The director’s role is to keep the audience guessing, which is also a way of keeping them awake and alive, as we try to decipher what the hell this all means.

There’s probably a more complex essay to be written about how this tallies with a Rioplatense consciousness, with its echoes of the oeuvres of Borges, Saer, Cortazar, Onetti among others. The ludic power of art. Maybe one day I, or another me, will get round to writing it. Meanwhile it was fascinating in the post-show talk to hear how the director was prepared to return and film another scene even after the film had premiered at BAFICI. The dexterity of the Pampero aesthetic is matched by the flexibility of their shooting methods. Ostende possesses a freshness predicated on its constant willingness to surprise, even if that surprise is a five minute sequence where someone narrates a film which will never get made. There’s the constant sense that you, along with the protagonist, have no real idea what is going to happen next, and that just makes you all the more anxious to find out, even if the subsequent discovery proves anti-climactic. Cinema becomes a maze full of dead ends and wrong turns, but there’s something fundamentally active and pleasurable contained within the frustrating process of navigating this labyrinth.