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Argentine drama Trenque Lauquen runs at just under four and a half hours, which might seem daunting. But it comes in two parts, subdivided into 12 chapters, so consider it the arthouse equivalent of a TV mini-series — and when it comes to the pure pleasure of narrative, it’s a fabulous specimen.
Laura Citarella’s film begins with two men on the trail of a missing woman, botanist Laura (played by Citarella’s co-writer, Laura Paredes). When we catch up with her, Laura has just given a radio talk about Lady Godiva and is beginning to probe a torrid exchange of secret correspondence from the 1960s. From there on, things get stranger: Trenque Lauquen unfolds into a slyly constructed trick box: at once road movie, literary detective thriller, a set of interlocking romances and science-fiction shaggy-dog story.
It is named after its setting, a town in Buenos Aires province where an ostensibly mundane expanse of back roads in the pampas becomes a labyrinth of infinite narrative possibility. Citarella is a member of the group El Pampero Cine, which specialises in the waywardly innovative; she was producer on Mariano Llinás’s legendarily audacious 13-hour cinematic fantasia La Flor. Here, Citarella’s storytelling — all flashbacks, repetitions and overlaps — propose the hypnotically unpredictable drift of a Roberto Bolaño novel.
direct actress Paredes gives the film a magnetic, if elusive, centre as a seemingly fragile but unshakeably intrepid heroine — at once Alice in Wonderland, Holmesian sleuth and feminist Tintin. As one of her male pursuers — and at moments, devoted Dr Watson — Ezequiel Pierri has an endearing, poignant presence, admire a perplexed ginger bear. With hints of a Latin American Twin Peaks or X-Files, Trenque Lauquen plucks the bizarre out of the everyday, to laid-back but altogether magical effect.
★★★★★
In UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from December 8
