Cinema: "Trenque Lauquen" by Laura Citarella, the mysteries of the pampas

The Argentine film Trenque Lauquen hits screens in France May 3, 2023. Her character, Laura, played by Laura Paredes (pictured), is a woman in perpetual quest. A film in the form of a challenge by its length (4 hours), by its construction and because it transgresses the codes of genre films. © Capricci Films

Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec

5 min

Discovered at the San Sebastián Festival and the Rencontres Cinélatino in Toulouse, Laura Citarella's film will be released this Wednesday, May 3 in theaters in France. Trenque Lauquen is a kind of UFO, like this water tower that appears repeatedly in the film. Six years of shooting, four hours of film and four hours of investigation, back and forth between past and present, carried out at a brisk pace. When the Argentine pampas, reputed so monotonous, becomes a fantastic territory of fiction.

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The first images of the film: two men in a gas station in the middle of nowhere in the early morning. One monologue on the phone, the other seems to wonder what he is doing there... And for a good ten minutes, one – the spectator – is lost. Rafael and Ezequiel, the only two male characters in the film, are looking for Laura. We understand this as the film, divided into two parts of six chapters each, progresses. Rafael, Laura's life companion, and Ezequiel, Chicho, her investigative companion, drive through the fields and towns: Trenque Lauquen, Fortín Olivarría, América, Piedritas... names that smell of deep Argentina, from pulqueria to gas station, drawing like a spider's web in which Laura may be hidden. Small towns that seem extraordinary banality with their checkerboard plan and small low houses. The palm trees in the public squares break the horizontality of the landscape, so flat that it seems infinite.

Orchids and love letters

History keeps moving forward and backward. The film is built on loops that reinforce the musical illustration with this recurring ballad, La canción de los caminos (The song of the paths), Viennese waltzes, or this lagoon that gave its name to Trenque lauquen (round lagoon in Mapuche language), the round bellies of Carmen Zuna and Elisa, pregnant... loops that thwart the infinity of the horizon. At the turn of one of these loops, we will understand that the Laura, who enters the film in the second chapter, is a biologist, specialist in orchids. The young woman came to the region to make an inventory of these plants, and she lacks one ("una pendiente") as it often lacks a key to understand all the mysteries of this film. "Voluntary omissions", explains the director, it is up to the spectator to fill the holes in the canvas. When she is not looking for orchids (this is her first quest of the film), Laura, played by Laura Paredes, actress and co-writer of the film, participates in a radio program in which she tells the life of women with extraordinary destiny. From the medieval Lady Godiva to the contemporary Alexandra Kollontai. To do this, she skims – and dusts off – the shelves of the municipal library. Hidden in the pages of a book by the Russian politician, she discovers a letter.

Trenque Lauquen, by Laura Citarella: initially, there were books in which Laura (Paredes) draws stories of women with extraordinary destinies that she tells on the radio... © Capricci Films

This letter is the first link of the second investigation, which she will lead, always with Ezequiel, a character as reserved and gentle as Laura is petulant and bubbly, while Rafael is like the "porteño" seen by provincials: sure of himself, a tad arrogant and macho. The different chapters of the film adopt the points of view of the multiple characters who enter the loop of the story, like a ball from which they would be several to pull the threads. The last chapter being that of Laura. Apart from the two men mentioned above, the film features a gallery of female characters – the film also won the grand prize for best fiction feature film at the Créteil Women's Film Festival. Strong, caring and loving women like Juliana, the director of the radio program, like Elisa and Romina who take care of the "monster of the lagoon" (at the heart of Laura's third investigation), or the boss of the pulqueria who feeds and warms the wandering young woman. Women weaving a protective web around Laura. They are like those characters that Laura evokes in her radio program, like Lady Godiva who sacrificed her modesty to spare her subjects from being strangled by the taxes imposed on them by Leofric, her lord husband. Women who also disappear, like Laura herself, like Carmen Zuna, the author of mysterious love letters, like Elisa and Romina.

In the film "Trenque Lauquen" by Laura Citarella, Dr. Elisa Esperanza is a mysterious character who protects a no less mysterious being, the monster of the lagoon. She is played by Elisa Carricajo, an actress who is also a member of the Piel de Lava theatre troupe, like Laura Paredes, and who was also seen in Mariano Llinás' "La Flor". © Capricci Films

Puzzle game

In search of somewhere else or themselves. They leave on foot, alone, in the pampas. The occupation of Argentine territory – the epic poem Martin Fierro is invoked in the film – by these immigrants from Europe, like the family of the director herself from northern Italy, is hollow in history. "Peregrinas de las pampas", pilgrims of the pampas, a term that sounds strange as it is rarely used in the feminine in French. We must indulge in the meanders of the story, the puzzle game, often funny and tender – such as listening to "Laura's confession" on the radio, which is addressed to Ezequiel and Juliana, but also to us, the spectators. Puzzle and cinema game: an assumed bias of deconstruction of the narrative, which blurs the codes – is it an adventure film, a film noir, a science fiction film? A moving film that opens doors and never closes them, a "mutant" film, announce the producers, like Laura who, during her wandering, covers herself with the frusques of strangers, and perhaps also the mysterious monster of the lagoon ...

Pampero cine (PC), making cinema differently

Laura Citarella, the director, was one of the founders of the collective Pampero Cine, which became known on this side of the Atlantic with the film-river La flor. A cooperative collective where everyone gets their hands dirty: Mariano Llinás, the director of La Flor and co-founder of PC is also credited with Trenque Lauquen's script and editing, as well as Alejo Moguillansky, another director of the collective; Agustin Mendilaharzu also a founding member is the director of photography; the actor Ezequiel Pierri (all the actors have kept their real names in the film by the way, Laura Citarrella, who has worked with Laura Paredes several times, considers her a kind of fictional double) is co-producer. Two of La Flor's actresses are in Trenque Lauquen, Laura Paredes and Elisa Carricajo, the film's mysterious doctor. They belong to the theatre company Piel de lava, which often works with PC directors. When cinema is also a tribal story! The purpose of Pampero Cine: to make films differently, to leave the traditional production and distribution circuits, to self-produce to break the formats, to allow life to fertilize the cinema and therefore to give free rein to the film desires of its members. Productions in which we find recurring themes, dear to these directors: the province of Buenos Aires to which both Mariano Llinás and Laura Citarella express their attachment, stories where it is about books or notebooks (Borgès is never far away), fields, roads and paths... There are also echo phenomena between Historias extraordinarias de Llinás and Trenque Lauquen. Few of the productions of the Pampero Cine team have been seen in France (La flor and Historias extraordinarias); but the Cinélatino festival, always clearing new cinema spaces, had paid tribute to them in 2019.

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