There is something awfully liberating in a filmmaker unwilling to totally understand the breadth of what he or she has created—willing instead to join the audience for a bit in exploring the alien reaches of what’s contained on screen. Filmmaking is treacherous terrain, after all: an audience puts its trust in both the film and the people behind the film to lead one logically through space-time—to be clear about where to look, and when, and for how long, so that eventually the film itself is an inhabited reality, the edges of which, between our reality and that of what we’re watching, grow blurrier by the minute. But what if a director loses some of that control, or better yet, offers us the compass willingly? Gives us some agency? Shit can get weird.
In his latest feature, the breathtaking Jauja, Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso demonstrates that he is the rare filmmaker who trusts his audience enough to winnow his films down to the bone. As he’s admitted, even he doesn’t know what’s really going on in this film. Here is a new stretch of undiscovered country, he asserts—let’s explore it together. And so, as he has done in the past, especially with his “Lonely Man Trilogy” (La libertad, Los muertos and Liverpool), Alonso patiently watches as a man, physically and psychologically alone, traverses a vaguely apocalyptic landscape, heading further and further into the middle of nowhere. His journey is as absurd as it is directionless, and before long, Alonso’s abandoned all pretense of this guy ever finding what he’s looking for, let alone a relief to the ever-building psychosis that must be accompanying him as he digs in his heels and ventures further into the unknown.
This time around, that man is Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen), an engineer working for the Danish military, accompanying the Argentinian army as they rid the Patagonian desert of all the indigenous, so-called “coconut heads.” When, in the film’s opening minutes, Dinesen asks fellow traveler Colonel Pittaluga (Adrián Fondari) why the native people are referred to in such an odd way, Pittaluga seems annoyed by the question, concerned only with their eradication. Granted, Pittaluga has recently finished masturbating, so he’s probably not ready to confront some difficult questions about race and colonization just yet. Still, his reaction is as clear as anything in Jauja will ever be: insulted at worst, and uninterested at best, in having to explain anything about what’s going on.
Pittaluga carries a similar attitude about concealing his self-pleasure, coincidentally finishing up right before Dinesen strolls into frame. Though the engineer is far in the distance, he suddenly and very jarringly destroys all semblance of privacy we assumed Pittaluga was counting on. Which is funny, because the pool in which Pittaluga was polishing his little soldier rests in the middle of a vastly open stretch of Patagonian coast, and one can assume that at any point any member of the army, or of Dinesen’s crew, or even Dinesen’s daughter Ingeborg (Viilbjørk Malling Agger) could stumble upon something best left imagined more than seen. Yet, Alonso is careful with what he provides the audience—we never see much of an army, only catch a glimpse of the “coconut heads,” never get to indulge in the Governor’s Ball that everyone’s talking about—and in that he seems to find endless joy in toying with ideas of obfuscation and clarity, with notions of what we deserve to see and what we should be wary about planting in our heads, unable to unsee. If anything, Jauja is about film as symbol—about movies as ways to represent both a reality we otherwise would have no access to, and a feeling we can’t quite manifest.
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