CANNES PREMIÈRE – OUT OF COMPETITION
The Cannes Film Festival sometimes looks so much like a fair with a moving subject, that a film without an immediately identifiable subject, where the viewer must make his way, suddenly seems like a breath of fresh air. This deep breath, this year, is Eureka, a river film by the Argentinian Lisandro Alonso, presented in the official selection of the Cannes Première section, that he will have returned to breathe it. Nine years after the pampero western Jauja (2014), this new film, extravagantly original, shares with the material of the dream the capacity to transform itself on sight, to cross time and space as if leapfrogging.
Until then, Lisandro Alonso was known as the rebellious star of the “new Argentine cinema” that appeared in the early 2000s, its frugal and rustic side (La Libertad entirely devoted to the work of a lumberjack) with a clear appetite for remote areas (liverpool (2009), an odyssey to the depths of Patagonia), so much so that they adjoin that of the dead (fantasy, 2006). With Eurekawe rediscover him as an American filmmaker in the first sense: because he focuses on the indigenous condition, not locally, on the scale of a tribe, but in a transcendent way, on that of a continent completely upset by colonial history.
The film is divided into three parts that we could almost call: Fiction, Reality and Myth. It all begins in black and white, under the auspices of a parody western, so boneless that a sense of macabre farce attaches to it. A gunslinger in search of his daughter (Viggo Mortensen) arrives in a remote village where a putrid air floats: bareheaded prostitutes, drunkards to the last degree and corpses with holes pile up in its muddy detours, where also prowls an adventurer named “El Coronel (Chiara Mastroianni). At the moment of the fatal duel, the performance is interrupted, giving way to the weather report: it was only a television soap opera, conveying folk clichés about the characters of Indians placed here and there (an old chief climbing the mountain). Hollywood fiction.
Unpredictable progression
off the TV, Eureka lands in Pine Ridge, alongside police officer Debonna (Alaina Clifford), for a long night of patrol on the great Sioux reservation in South Dakota. The night is dark, the landscape buried under heavy snow. Passing from one emergency to another, the round reveals a distressing social situation, populations in the most complete abandonment. Connected to the central station by radio contact alone, Debonna criss-crosses this darkness, experiencing her insufficiency as a radical loneliness.
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