Eureka
The French lady lives in South Dakota and has her car broken down in a school gymnasium, when a girl practicing her free throws describes herself to the lady, who is Chiara Mastroianni, as Magic Johnson. The latter introduced herself as a French, and asking the girl, ‘And you? Where are you from?’ The young dame replied, ‘Good question. I ask myself this every day on an indigenous reservation of sorts.‘ This is exactly what she means is a need for each and every American in United States in this part of the world. Even if they reside in poverty ridden places and still continue battling on an indigenous base. There rests the whole Northeastern portion of American.
Not flinching from some of the monotones where your focus remains on what could be one’s residence- this confusion is the very center of the “Eureka” culminating in ‘Home’ through the graceful visions of Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso. If you care to understand the location from within in which much of chaos though carefully knitted is to unfold, you will need to keep your ambitions in check till the film finally comes together in the first 25 minutes. This is probably the least shocking statement of the entire writing.
In those first minutes, we see the images of a Native man on a cliff presumably (there are no visuals) singing the songs of his ancestors. From here, it becomes something of a Western, peopled by heroes of a kind, but with glaring omissions of the Indigenous people.
Viggo Mortenson depicts a classic lone hero, focused and on a mission. Mortenson’s character shoots a man to gain access to a room, and it’s possible that he disposes of the two bodies found in the same bed he’s occupied. This section both glorifies and perverts the stereotypes of the genre. Mastroianni appears to take on a role bearing close similarities to Joan Crawford’s Vienna in ‘Johnny Guitar.’ When we hear an off-screen Irishman’s voice singing, one is led to consider a close replica of Marlene Dietrich’s back room cigarette girl from ‘Destry Rides Again.’ Well, it’s just a nun singing. And so on. The dry terrain here seems to overpower the inhabitants, resulting in numerous instances wherein the sky occupies more than fifty percent of the shot. There is also a feel of what would have been Sergio Leone’s westerns, had they been black & white, shot in the Academy ratio. This sense of pastiche is further enhanced by the fact that this sequence flows into a widescreen narrative based in modern-day South Dakota.
This time however, Mastroianni is not an actress as Mastroianni is in those scenes seen in the video as part of the film but as herself because she has come to the region to shoot a Western. There isn’t much tension in the area in the present day. There are local news reports where a TV presenter says ‘our beautiful native community lives in such region’ and, with that, many centuries of complex domination and submission are crystallized into just a single phrase. There, an overworked and overqualified Native American officer wrestles with drug fueled natives in the slum while her niece takes shots and tries to find a better place in this world.
Alonso’s ‘documentary style’ realism dangerously vies with the propensity of the audience to be distanced from the material. One of the brightest images is the one of the cop played by Alaina Clifford, who sits in her own car parked at an angle while looking outside the window as a prisoner struggling to turn her head, complains incessantly about the handcuffs cutting into her wrists and ‘the need to go the toilet’. There is something dissonant but compelling in a prolonged, almost unbearably slow, procedures for visiting a prisoner.
An hour and a half into the movie, our possible title character appears. She’s a bird a heron like creature that heads for a dirt sculpture, flies through the dissolve towards the forest, and settles over a mountain range. This brings us to the last sequence, focused on another group of indigenous peoples, this time from South America. It is more much more focused on the plot than the central one, which turned into gloomy, crime, mixed up with mystics.
A shocking image of an otherwise clean mountain stream littered with a battered Pepsi can is sufficiently expressive, and harshly simple, conveys the disturbing relative indifference of the filmmaker to the proceedings.
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