A lawless town in America’s ‘Wild West’, a Reservation in South Dakota, and the Amazon rainforest are the settings for Lisandro Alonso’s ethereal observations of the effects of land colonisation on the American continents.
Eureka, the newest feature from Argentinian director/writer Lisandro Alonso (Jauja), is more poem than narrative, and one which demands that the viewer watches intently, as dialogue is deliberately sparse.
While not really a portmanteau film, Eureka is nevertheless a collection of vaguely connected ‘stories’ – probably ‘situations’ is a better description – loosely linked by a theme of land ownership/appropriation/colonisation of territory in both North and South America over the last couple of centuries.
In the opening section, Alonso teams up again with Viggo Mortensen who plays a gunman entering a lawless town, instantly recognisable from any number of 20th century Western films. Having killed several people in cold blood in order to achieve his mission, the scene cleverly merges into a contemporary setting, that of the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota. We meet Alaina (Alaina Clifford), a police officer preparing for her lonely night shift. Highlighting the complete under-resourcing of law enforcement on the Reservation, and the hopelessness in which many of the population exist, Alaina’s resigned desperation is apparent. Meanwhile, her niece Sadie (Sadie LaPointe) has also decided that she has had enough and enlists her grandfather’s help to finally get away and start a completely new life. This is the point at which the film enters a more dreamlike or fantasy territory, and we find ourselves swooping southwards from snowy South Dakota to the Amazon rainforest and encounter a small group of native people sitting together sharing the dream they had while sleeping the previous night.
Trying to explain why and how all of the above is part of the same film would spoil a viewer’s first impressions (and would also suggest that this viewer understood what was happening); Lisandro Alonso seems to be interested in how the fates of land and its indigenous people have been affected over the centuries, but in a way which is not necessarily hugely accessible on first watch.
The section featuring the police officer dealing with successive incidents on her night duty is by far the most interesting and contains a lot of information in the details with so much more to explore, but a different direction was chosen. I would love to see a whole film about Alaina and the other characters whom we briefly encounter on the Reservation.
It’s alarming though that on IMDb none of the indigenous characters are named, some are not mentioned at all despite being pivotal to their section of the film, and most of the indigenous actors do not have images in the cast listing. And this also raises, not for the first time, the question of whether such stories would be better told by Native American filmmakers?
Lisandro Alonso’s films are very particular and not for everyone. The flights of fantasy and dreamscapes may be ethereal and are indeed beautiful, but the real life experiences of Alaina and Sadie seem to offer something much more interesting.
Eureka will be released in selected UK cinemas on 16th February 2024.
A lawless town in America’s ‘Wild West’, a Reservation in South Dakota, and the Amazon rainforest are the settings for Lisandro Alonso’s ethereal observations of the effects of land colonisation on the American continents.
Eureka, the newest feature from Argentinian director/writer Lisandro Alonso (Jauja), is more poem than narrative, and one which demands that the viewer watches intently, as dialogue is deliberately sparse.
While not really a portmanteau film, Eureka is nevertheless a collection of vaguely connected ‘stories’ – probably ‘situations’ is a better description – loosely linked by a theme of land ownership/appropriation/colonisation of territory in both North and South America over the last couple of centuries.
In the opening section, Alonso teams up again with Viggo Mortensen who plays a gunman entering a lawless town, instantly recognisable from any number of 20th century Western films. Having killed several people in cold blood in order to achieve his mission, the scene cleverly merges into a contemporary setting, that of the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota. We meet Alaina (Alaina Clifford), a police officer preparing for her lonely night shift. Highlighting the complete under-resourcing of law enforcement on the Reservation, and the hopelessness in which many of the population exist, Alaina’s resigned desperation is apparent. Meanwhile, her niece Sadie (Sadie LaPointe) has also decided that she has had enough and enlists her grandfather’s help to finally get away and start a completely new life. This is the point at which the film enters a more dreamlike or fantasy territory, and we find ourselves swooping southwards from snowy South Dakota to the Amazon rainforest and encounter a small group of native people sitting together sharing the dream they had while sleeping the previous night.
Trying to explain why and how all of the above is part of the same film would spoil a viewer’s first impressions (and would also suggest that this viewer understood what was happening); Lisandro Alonso seems to be interested in how the fates of land and its indigenous people have been affected over the centuries, but in a way which is not necessarily hugely accessible on first watch.
The section featuring the police officer dealing with successive incidents on her night duty is by far the most interesting and contains a lot of information in the details with so much more to explore, but a different direction was chosen. I would love to see a whole film about Alaina and the other characters whom we briefly encounter on the Reservation.
It’s alarming though that on IMDb none of the indigenous characters are named, some are not mentioned at all despite being pivotal to their section of the film, and most of the indigenous actors do not have images in the cast listing. And this also raises, not for the first time, the question of whether such stories would be better told by Native American filmmakers?
Lisandro Alonso’s films are very particular and not for everyone. The flights of fantasy and dreamscapes may be ethereal and are indeed beautiful, but the real life experiences of Alaina and Sadie seem to offer something much more interesting.
Eureka will be released in selected UK cinemas on 16th February 2024.
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