Trenque Lauquen

“Farewell, farewell. I’m leaving, I’m leaving.” That’s the note Laura left behind, abandoning her research in the titular town southwest of Buenos Aires. Her boyfriend Rafael and colleague Ezequiel, both of them in love with her, take up the search, but the harder they look, the more mysteries they encounter.

From the same production company behind La Flor, (which she appeared in), Laura Citarella’s epic movie – which is split into two parts and 12 chapters – would surely have appealed to Jorge Luis Borges for the ease with which it slips between narratives, opening up side routes and diversions (a lesbian love affair; a mutant creature) until we’re all happily lost in the woods.

Screening with a 30 minute intermission between part one and two

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT:

This film is part of a larger idea: a group of films where the same character lives different lives in different towns in the province of Buenos Aires. The first film of the saga is called Ostende and it’s my first film as a director. The character—Laura—is always performed by Laura Paredes. And the director, myself, also Laura. Perhaps too many Lauras. But what crosses the whole saga is a central idea: a female Sherlock Holmes ’of sorts’ lost in towns, keener for adventures than anything else. A film composed by different kind of women. Women who chase women. Female detectives. Female Scientists. Women that, for different reasons, run away. The cartographies of books as maps to live. Maternity. The conquest of territory. Men in love. The nobility of some men. The idiocy of the same men. The bureaucracy and the flowers. The town. The humans. The animals. The plants. The unknown.

Wondrous… Citarella’s film posits that being lost can be a kind of liberation, and that mystery, in movies, can be an end in itself… Familiar hints of horror and detective stories appear like red herrings, but the ultimate effect is of a campfire tale: The pleasure lies in the telling — the invention of fictions, the performance of emotions — rather than in the details of plot. Once you lose yourself in the thickets of Trenque Lauquen, you won’t want to be found.

Devika Girish, New York Times

Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes, of losing oneself as the catalyst for realizing no one has a set, permanent self to lose in the first place.

Jake Cole, Slant