Jauja | Lisandro Alonso | NYFF 2014
Lisandro Alonso shot Jauja in the old school ratio of 4:3, with the edges of the square rounded, giving us a vintage look that transports the viewer to a different place entirely. Even by limited the amount of space in terms of wideness, Alonso is able to make use of space in a way that feels more complete. The rich and colorful images that result are straight out of a dream, in a place that we can’t even conceive.
Jauja is set in 1882, taking place in a military outpost in Patagonia, during a genocidal campaign against the indigenous people of the region known as “Conquest Of The Desert.” We see the war through the eyes of Captain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen), an engineer who has come all the way from Denmark along with his 15-year-old daughter Ingeborg (Viilbjørk Malling Agger). Unfortunately for Captain Dinesen, Ingeborg is the only female in the area, naturally garnering a great deal of attention from men within the camp. She ends up running away with a young soldier, which sends the Captain into enemy territory to find his daughter before the hostile natives of the land do.
From there Jauja dives into something completely different. Although there are some elements of classic westerns as the Captain embarks on his search on horseback, he spends a lot of time alone isolated in a barren empty land. Alonso captures the space perfectly, making it clear that our protagonist is going on a spiritual journey that plays like a untimely existential crisis. We spend all our time with Viggo Mortensen, and he’s the man for the job. He gets lost in the role, playing a man totally transfixed by the land, caught by its impenetrable spell. His performance is crucial to the film’s success, and thankfully he is pitch perfect.
Credit to the work of Finnish cinematographer Timo Salminen who captures the land vividly. Alonso’s choice of shooting in the square aspect ratio has a direct effect on how we experience the film, and it’s hard to shake. Things get less and less clear for the Captain as he dives deeper in the land, and it becomes a guessing game for the audience as to what is really happening.
By the end of the journey, Jauja dives a bit too deep, and it lost me a bit along the way. But there’s something hard to shake about it’s ending, that will leave audience members engaging in hot debates as to what the hell actually happened. It’s not a perfect film, but there’s a mystique to it that’s impossible to shake, and left me feeling a certain sort of way. That’s got to be worth something.
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