This was originally published for cutprintfilm.com back in March of 2015. But since the site has apparently vanished - I'm posting it here with a few updates as my love for this movie has grown over the last nine years.
This is also the perfect time to revisit Jauja with it's loose sequel set to be released soon (click here to read)
Before going in to Jauja – Lisandro Alonso’s latest multinational semi-surrealist period drama, please erase any & all comparisons to the cinema of David Lynch. Between the initial film festival reports and the IMDB message board discussions, I found that Lynch was the most commonly used reference point in a lot of early reviews of this film. While David Lynch is certainly one of the greatest modern surrealist directors to pick up a camera, he certainly didn’t influence every single movie that could possibly be categorized as “strange” or “different”, and Jauja is definitely an example of this (the Lynch comparisons have since cooled off, but I worry some folks will still expect his style of surrealism here when they really shouldn’t). David Lynch did invent nor does he have a trademark on surreality.
For those of you looking for some kind of a comparison (which I feel helps when dealing with a movie like this), I’d place Jauja somewhere in between the cinema of Carlos Reygadas (specifically Japon & Silent Light) and Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin, which, coincidentally, co-stars Jauja leading man & film score composer Viggo Mortensen (the criminally underrated Reflecting Skin was one of Moretensen’s earliest roles). The multi-nationalism/multi-culturalism that we see in Jauja is reminiscent of the Danish/Latin-American hybrid dialogue in Silent Light, while the rural environment and gorgeous landscape shots, courtesy of cinematographer; Timo Salminen (with the subconscious influence of Nestor Almendros), are right out of The Reflecting Skin (the exploration of boredom within The Reflecting Skin also appears to be a possible influence on Alonso’s latest film). There’s also a touch of Kelly Reichardt’s Meeks Cutoff in that Jauja is more of a realistic “road movie” that shows the grueling side of making a long journey prior to the invention of the automobile (and even with cars, road trips were far from glorious). And like Meeks Cutoff, Jauja challenges what one might expect from a western.
Set in the 19th century (…or is it?), Danish general “Gunnar” (Viggo) is stationed on an outpost in Argentina on a mission to ultimately rid the Patagonian land of its indigenous people (this aspect of the movie plays the background but should not be forgotten). When his daughter “Ingeborg” unexpectedly runs off with a young soldier, Gunnar sets out to find her but slowly loses his mind in the process similar to Chris Kelvin in Solaris (in fact, the environment surrounding Gunnar on his journey almost mimics the planet of Solaris). Like some elements in the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, the last 10-15 minutes of Jauja is an especially trippy (although calm) journey in to the subconscious (I know Tarkovsky is another overused reference point in film criticism but the comparison to Jauja is reasonable in my opinion). The relationship between fathers & daughters can sometimes be complicated and Lisandro Alonso gives us an abstracted view in to this relationship.
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This is the kind of movie that will be unfairly labeled as boring & pretentious by some and hastily called a beautiful work of art by others. After almost a decade of re-watches and over-analysis on my part - I personally think this is a masterpiece.