- Viggo Mortensen in Jauja
Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja—which plays again at the Siskel Center tonight and tomorrow—should be seen on a big screen or not at all. Crucial scenes of this art house spectacle transpire in extreme long-shot, the actors presented as mere dots on the Patagonian Desert landscapes where the action unfolds. On a TV or computer screen, you can hardly make out the human figures during such moments, which might lead you to believe that nothing’s happening in the shots. In a theater, though, the characters are big enough to discern, while the verdant, rocky settings, rendered monumental, make the characters seem insignificant. (The soundtrack—a dense mix of wind, animal noises, and other vividly recorded phenomena—makes the natural world seem even more imposing.) This dwarfing of people by nature isn’t just awesome to behold—it’s central to what Jauja‘s about. The movie’s also about the legacy of Spanish colonialism in South America, but Alonso is too oblique and intuitive a filmmaker to issue anything like a historical statement. Jauja is, first and foremost, an experience.
Emphasizing the theme of missing persons, Alonso refuses to show us multiple characters who factor prominently in the dialogue: Zuluaga, many of the Spanish soldiers on the base, or the natives whom Pittaluga disparages. While searching for his daughter Mortensen at one point passes a team of European soldiers digging a trench. The image feels positively alien, since you’re not used to seeing so many people in the same shot. The presence of a crowd feels disruptive, even if you can’t immediately articulate why. It’s as though Alonso wants to adopt the perspective of the Patagonian Desert itself, for which the first European settlers (even those as inherently charismatic as Viggo Mortensen) might as well have been space aliens. That so much of the film evades understanding—not just the viewer’s, but the characters’—suggests that the desert might be having its revenge on the people that bewildered it.
