Jauja

Gorgeous cinematography with bright green and blue tones in an unconventional aspect ratio, set in Argentine Patagonia, and having almost no music score (emphasizing natural noises, instead). All those traits make this Danish-Argentine-French-Mexican-German production to be unusual among Westerns. As a matter of fact, its script is even more deviant. While general plot - a mounted armed man searching his daughter in the wild - may be compared to John Ford's The Searchers, the pictoric or symbolic element puts it closer to films such as Jodorovsky's El Topo or Jarmusch's Dead Man, although having no comic relief and being more violent. The script makes no sense in linear narrative terms, and it is open to multiple interpretations as you may notice if you read a wide number of reviews. A Danish family in an Argentine military action in Patagonia directed to killing native people; a supposedly deserter with rumored bizarre habits; an officer who speaks French and thinks about the ball planned by his superiors; a harsh officer who hates Indians, has strong sexual appetite and wants the Danish girl; that teenager evades with a young soldier with no pevious sign that she intended something like that. Nothing fit very well and dialogues lead nowhere. It becomes more obvious when even more surrealistic situations eventualy happen. Indeed, nothing may be taken literally, but there is also no recipe for connnecting the pieces either. What does Viggo Mortensen's character deeply searches? What the desert in the end of the world means for him? What does his daughter represents? What her two latter appearances mean? What those officers and the native Americans symbolize? Many open questions to think about.

This film eases even the most savage man. It's a movie that must be seen with calm and patience due to its "low-revolutions" script. The world created for this story is more than great; in less than five minutes we feel immersed in this appeased lands of introspective and humidity, tons of humidity. I get my hands off the keyboard to applaud Lisandro Alonso and Fabian Casas for the sublime script. Choosing to play with such an abstract theme as it is the "dreaming/paralel world/spiritual trip" is admirable but challenging and they got through it in the most smooth way. Even though I really enjoyed Jauja I was left with a bittersweet taste, and this taste was brought by the format/size the movie was projected (4:3). I felt that my heart was ripped apart with each landscape maimed. My regards, Guido.

This reminds me a lot of Gerry. This is a deep and very experimental film, not really a film that would be easy to recommend to casual audiences at all. It was surprising to see viggo mortensen in a role like this, and he does well, sort of. It's hard to really grasp how to judge him and the film around him. What I will say is that, just on that aspect, the film just wasn't very intriguing and that's really the one failing that makes or breaks a film. I was bored, and I rarely like to use that as a criticism but it is in this case. I definitely don't recommend it, even if I feel like there are some nice scenes here and there and some great cinematography. It's a film I don't like but I don't hate because it's still something different.

So refreshing to see a film that is not afraid to play around with the conventional idea of linear narrative. An intriguing blend of Tarkovsky, Apocalypse Now, and Bela Tar. It made me want to follow up this director's earlier films. The attention span of many film goers seems to be shrinking fast, judging by the criticisms of the lingering shots which Juaja features. Novels, music and art installations all play with time and space, and film can do the same, in the right hands, as here. Credit to Mortensen for lending his 'name' to a project like this, and for giving such a restrained performance. The real star of Juaja is the landscape, which silently conveys the truth that wild nature will always trump human activity.

After really loving the first Alonso film I saw, 'Los Muertos', I've struggled somewhat with his films I've seen since. For some reason Alonso's dedication to vaguely mythic and very enigmatic storytelling worked great for me in 'Los Muertos' -- creating a deeply disturbing portrait of a man who is leaving prison and returning to his family, perhaps to kill them (or perhaps not).

Jauja is also the familial story of a man on a mythic journey, in this case a Danish Captain in the army, stationed in an unspecific south or central American country that is in the midst of being colonized by the Spanish, with the Danish presence seeming to be one of both rivalry and co- operation. Viggo Mortensen (always excellent) plays the Captain, who has brought his daughter with him (why he would bring her to such a hostile, dangerous and male dominated environment is never made clear). When she runs off with a young soldier, Mortensen's character heads out to find her, and ends up traveling into his own soul, with the lines blurring between real and imagined, reality and surrealism.

The film looks great, and has a lot of striking and memorable moments. But after two viewings, I wasn't sure quite what it was saying, and – worse – I'm not entirely convinced it does either. That said, there are enough things I admire; the odd photography, the many strange and discomforting images and incidents that stick in my head like memories of a bad dream, that I'm willing to forgive it's frustrations. To a point.