Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen
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El Pampero Cine, the fiercely independent production company established twenty years ago in Buenos Aires, is probably best known outside of Argentina for La flor (2018). Directed by Mariano Llinás, produced by Laura Citarella, shot by Agustín Mendilaharzu, and coedited by Alejo Moguillansky, the six-part, thirteen-and-a-half-hour genre sampler showcases the talents of all four of the collective’s founding members. One of La flor’s stars, Laura Paredes, appears in Citarella’s first directorial feature, Ostende (2011). She plays Laura, a woman Citarella describes as “a female Sherlock Holmes of sorts lost in towns, keener for adventures [more] than anything else.”
Laura is back, or rather, in and out of Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen, a pair of features cowritten by the director and star. In the first of twelve chapters, she’s gone missing, and her boyfriend (Rafael Spregelburd) and a driver she’s worked with (Ezequiel Pierri) team up to track her down. In flashbacks, Laura discusses “Women Who Made History” on a local radio program and studies the flora in and around Trenque Lauquen, a modestly sized city a few hundred miles west of Buenos Aires. Her research leads to the discovery of an erotically charged correspondence between secret lovers stashed away decades ago in books strewn throughout the local library.
Trenque Lauquen is “a detective caper, a thriller, a sci-fi tale, a romance,” writes Leonardo Goi in the Notebook. “It’s also, perhaps most significantly, a film that crackles with an inordinate fondness for storytelling, a fable that unfolds as a campfire story, the kind which, as [with] the best of them, fuels a childlike receptivity to the fantastical, and a hunger for wonder.” Introducing his interview with Citarella, Goi notes that Jorge Luis Borges “hovers above [the film] as an essential touchstone.” At In Review Online, Lawrence Garcia finds that the “narrative indirection serves, in the end, no other purpose but negation,” but for Zhuo-Ning Su at the Film Stage, this “hypnotic mix of earthbound, realist cinema, and fanciful surrealism has whispers of Miguel Gomes or Alice Rohrwacher.”
Three cinematographers—Mendilaharzu, Inés Duacastella, and Yarará Rodriguez—shoot Trenque Lauquen “with ample, warm natural light,” but “there’s an almost Brontean quality to this multidimensional love story,” writes Jake Cole at Slant. “The substance of each mystery that compels Laura is ultimately less important than the allure of chasing down answers and only finding more questions. Many artists have taken similarly postmodern notions of an impossible truth into realms of despair and madness, but Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.”
Trenque Lauquen premiered in Venice and screens this week in New York, next week in Ghent, and next month at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles. Further down the line, we may well see Laura again. “I don’t know if there’ll be another one in the saga,” Citarella tells David Katz at Cineuropa, before quickly adding, “We should have three.”
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