Jauja

Many films that try to do what Jauja did fall flat due to one simple flaw. Tedium. Many drone on and on till even the most patient film goer ends up bored and any deeper meaning of the film is lost to them.

Jauja is a slow paced, quiet, and visual film, but it never feels wearing. There's a sense of pace, a slow pace, but a pace and a rhythm that never makes it difficult to watch.

It is made up largely of long, beautiful shots, usually devoid of any music and containing only minimalist dialog. The whole affair has a sort of dreamlike feel. This movie is far less about characters and story and meaning than it is about tone and mood and aesthetics. If it's an aesthetic you enjoy than the film will engross you.

All that said I wasn't truly blown away by it. Nothing really ever shocked or grabbed or awed me. It was beautiful, it was enjoyable, but not really inspiriting on any higher level. It is in the end like a very nice dream, pleasant while you're in it, worth remembering after, but not really anything that carries with you long after waking.

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.

I went to see director Lisandro Alonso's 'Jauja' especially because his earlier trilogy blew me away. 'La Libertad' (2001), 'Los Muertos' (2004) and 'Fantasma' (2006) each observe a solitary man – a survivor – roaming through the jungle wordlessly, like a wild animal. (The setting of 'Fantasma' is urban, but can also metaphorically be regarded as a jungle.) A decade later, I am still amazed by the power of those films and by how little they rely on plot, dialogue or props. Alonso's 2008 effort, 'Liverpool', is also minimalist and follows a similar theme, but tells a slightly more specific story.

'Jauja' is more elaborate than any of Alonso's previous work. As in 'Liverpool', there is something like a plot and very limited, but significant dialogue (in Spanish, Danish and French, in this case). A gorgeous, more sophisticated cinematography presents landscapes that bring to mind 19th Century oil paintings. This is a period film that involves realistic costumes and the kind of beautifully crafted tools used by explorers and the military in the 1800s. Also, 'Jauja' features a famous actor, Viggo Mortensen of 'The Lord of the Rings', who co-produced it and co-wrote the musical score. I think this was all a great way for Alonso to try something new and fresh, without giving up his very unique style and aesthetics.

Don't expect a linear, mainstream film or you may be disappointed. This is an art-house Western – a strange, slow-paced ride through the vast, open space of the Argentine Patagonia. It addresses the exhilarating sense of adventure, but also of violence and dread, that one might experience in the hinterland. The story reminds me of Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', in that it depicts a struggle between the forces of "civilization" and the primitive, while also drawing a parallel between the wilderness of outdoor nature and our subconscious. (Alonso's film 'Los Muertos', which shows a man travelling along a river, may also have a link to Conrad's short novel.) The film's tempo, surreal situations and the use of places as a reference to states of mind are reminiscent of Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' or 'Solaris'.

We are explained that "Jauja" is a mythical land of abundance, something akin to paradise, whose search in the old days drove many to ruin. Dinesen (Mortensen) aims to establish order in a distant, foreign land, but keeps running into unruly behavior, left and right. It's as if the indomitable spirit of the desert possessed everyone around him and suggested to him – with its dreamy voice, sometimes forcefully, sometimes playfully – that his stubbornly controlling approach towards life is misguided, a lost cause. Perhaps more than in any other film he's made, the director achieves communicating something magical and ethereal, pointing to the deep, enigmatic wisdom that we each hold inside, but are afraid to listen to. The ending may imply that all these characters are, in fact, interconnected, showing different sides of the same stone (much like the "animus" and "anima" in Jungian psychology describe the male and female aspects in every person, for example).

Like Alonso's earlier trilogy, 'Jauja' poetically hints at the magnificence and mystery of human life in God's garden. Its images and sounds seem to come from far, far away, yet somehow feel eerily familiar and close.

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.