Review: Lisandro Alonso’s Ambitious Eureka Takes on the Ravages of Colonialism in the Americas

It’s taken close to nine years for a new film by Lisandro Alons>o, Argentina’s leading exponent of slow cinema, to reach our screens. The release of Eureka may not be as momentous as the release, a couple of weeks ago, of Víctor Erice’s far superior (as far as slow cinema goes) Close Your Eyes but fans of Alonso’s contemplative, elliptical, sometimes enigmatic but always demanding filmography will not only rejoice but spend hours if not days and months dissecting it.

Eureka is, without a doubt, Alonso’s most ambitious film: a triptych shot in four countries, in three different aspect ratios and in English and Portuguese. It also features Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni as the headliners, but you can’t help but feel that their presence is meant to justify the film’s European financing (although in Mortensen's case, it gave him the opportunity to collaborate once again with Alonso after 2014’s Jauja).

Alonso also tackles a larger subject matter: the impact of colonialism over the Americas’ indigenous communities. Alonso doesn’t address this theme directly or overtly. For him, it is enough to observe these indigenous characters interacting with their environment and with others. But, unlike the word that gives the film its title, there was no eureka moment for me, especially after having seen such equally observational, sometimes languidly paced films about the long-term impact of colonialism and white supremacy over these communities, including Felipe Galvez’s stunning The Settlers (Los colonos shown early this year at the Siskel Film Center) and Maya Da-rin’s A Febre (The Fever).

Alonso opens Eureka with a Native American chanting on a beach’s rocky shores. Shot in pristine black and white in Academy aspect ratio with curved corners, the scene transitions to the first story, one that you could call the prototypical Alonso story: a man in search of his missing daughter. That man is Murphy (Mortensen), a sharpshooter who arrives at a lawless town in search of his abducted daughter. There he is told by the town’s apparent leader El Coronel (Mastroianni) where he can find her. The plot almost feels like a satirical remake of Jauja, where Mortensen played a Danish official in search of his daughter in the Argentinean Pampas after she elopes with an Argentine soldier. This first story also taps into Alonso’s fascination with the classic Western and its tropes.

 But just as the story is about to reach a pivotal moment, Alonso reveals that we were actually watching a Western broadcast in a South Dakota channel, background noise for Alaina (Alaina Clifford) as she prepares to go to work as an officer for the Pine Ridge Reservation’s understaffed police department, and for her niece Sadie (Sadie Lapointe), a basketball coach at the local gym who wakes up early to see her aunt off. It’s about the only time that Alonso hits you over the head with something so obvious: western movies equal the obliteration of the indigenous, get it?

It is one of two missteps Alonso makes in the film. Fortunately, it does not take away from what follows: a carefully observant and even empathetic look at the toll life in a reservation takes on its inhabitants. Shot in widescreen and in color, this second story is the strongest of the three, one that finds Alonso exploring new territory while staying true to his style. The time he spent on the reservation, following Mortensen’s advice, talking to its residents pays off with spades as well.

This night is no different than any other for Alaina: check-ins on reservation residents who have succumbed to drug and alcoholism; tending to calls where folks with serious health problems threaten to harm others; and taking a French actress (Mastroianni doing double duty) in town to do research for a Western she will be working to the local gym after the actress’ car breaks down. An off-color remark by the actress about teen suicide in the reservation triggers Sadie: “Are you one of those reporters here to give us bad press?”

Both Alaina and Sadie seem to be at a breaking point. Alonso’s observational style works wonders here, as it watches both women deal with the pain and the sense of being trapped in a world not of their own making. For Alaina it is worse: each scream from the pregnant woman with mental health issues sitting in the back of her patrol car feels like a hammer insistently hitting a nail, each update from police dispatch that there is no backup for her tonight adding to a sense of being all alone in the world. Clifford’s body language is pitch perfect; you sense her weariness and the realization that she is powerless. 

Sadie could be the future of this reservation but with her teen boyfriend in jail, she wants a way out and finds it with the help of her grandfather in her culture’s own myths and legends. Lapointe also shines in this segment: in one scene, as she drinks the tea her grandfather made, we see her face transition from pain to sadness, fear, resignation and anticipation, as she prepares to begin a new journey. Too bad that Alonso spoils it by taking a fanciful, almost magical realist turn to introduce the third and least effective story.

He introduces us to an indigenous community in Brazil’s Amazon region in 1971. They gather around their tribe’s shaman to share their dreams. One of them commits murder over a woman and flees, finding work, and exploitation, foraging for gold. There’s not much more to this final segment than that. Not that Alonso cares much for story, but it feels tacked on.

There is no real connection between these and the first two stories with its deep American roots. And while I can appreciate Alonso’s desire to show the exploitation of these indigenous communities as a continuum that unites all of the Americas, this final third throws the whole thing off-balance. In fact, by making this third community function as a stand-in for all of Latin America’s indigenous communities, Alonso is committing the same crime that many colonizers made before him and continue to make: denying them their unique identities as a people. 

Eureka is playing exclusively at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

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Alejandro Riera