Eureka Review: A Slow Journey Through Time and Space

direction: Lisandro Alonso | Scenario: Fabian Casas, Lisandro Alonso, Martin Caamaño | Throws: Viggo Mortensen (Murphy), Chiara Mastroianni (El Coronel, Maya), Ravi Bates (Randall), Alina Clifford (Agent DiBona), Sadie LaPointe (Sadie), Vilbjork Molling Ager (Molly), others | game time: 146 minutes | year: 2023

Letter V Eureka It states that time is a human invention and does not actually exist. I have rarely felt such a sense of time as in this beautifully shot art film by Lisandro Alonso. The Argentine director relishes long shots of people doing nothing or exhibiting repetitive behavior, especially in the second half of the film. This may turn some viewers off, but this approach makes the film less appealing to a wider audience.

Fans of Viggo Mortensen will surely want to see this print. But they will be disappointed, as Viggo only has twenty-five minutes of screen time. Appearing in the first of three novels that Alonso ties together, Viggo plays a cowboy searching for his daughter in a village filled with brothels, hotheads and drunken scum. In terms of genre, it is a Western reminiscent of black-and-white photography. dead man By Jim Jarmusch. But before the climax can reach its conclusion, Alonzo suddenly turns to another story.

You could compare the second narrative to a documentary. We first follow an Indian police officer in the Oglala Lakota territory of South Dakota, who, among other things, arrests a drunk woman and helps a French actress with engine trouble. Once the officer disappears from the picture, her niece Sadie becomes the protagonist. The girl is so disillusioned with life on the reservation that she seeks a way out with her grandfather.

We enter the third story via a giant stork, but it explicitly leaves the first two. Some shots no longer have any relation to the narrative or resemble fast-forward. The story begins with members of a Brazilian Indian tribe in 1974 telling their dreams to the chief. This evolves into a slow-motion drama of a man who, after a criminal act, searches for gold for a Portuguese in the Amazon jungle. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s dreamy cinema is not far off here. Nor is your desire for your bed.

What connects the three stories are the endings without a conclusion, some details and the natives. In the first story with Vigo, there are hardly any Indians to be seen, but in most Westerns you don’t see many of them either, except for the savages. And they are conspicuous by their absence. It works in contrast to the second story, in which you confront the problematic conditions of the Indians on the Pine Ridge reservation. What Alonso presents here is the most original and interesting in the entire film. But the Argentine had to reveal his artistic soul if necessary.

By adding painfully slow shots, it quickly loses part of the audience who is fully interested in what is happening in such a confinement. Then we get another hour of slow cinema that is more about fever dreams than reality. Which means the film is almost two and a half hours long. Slow movies can evoke a very specific atmosphere, hypnotizing you, so to speak. But sometimes, the delay interferes with all the empathy and loses its essence. This is in Eureka the case.