Laura Citarella’s movie is a coolly unhurried four hours-plus, split into two parts of around two hours each; it is from the same producer, in fact, as Argentinian auteur Mariano Llinás’s legendary 13-and-a-half hour film La Flor. Compared with that, Trenque Lauquen – whose title means “round lake” and is a city in Buenos Aires province – is a mere cine-haiku; but it is still a domestic epic, a giant puzzle, a whopping solutionless mystery and a meandering shaggy dog story with a hint of Borges or AS Byatt’s Possession. And Citarella might have mixed these influences with Lynch or even David Robert Mitchell’s divisive noir Under the Silver Lake. Yet for all its deadpan charm, there is something here which I couldn’t quite make friends with, or engage with fully. I think it is the way that the film jumps, or maybe shark-jumps, from one strange story to another after the intermission.
Trenque Lauquen is a follow-up, or development of sorts, to Citarella’s earlier, briefer film Ostende from 2011, and like that film it stars Laura Paredes as Laura, a botanist and sometime broadcaster on women’s history at a local radio station (no new-fangled podcasts here). Disturbingly, Laura has gone missing from the city of the title, and two men are travelling around looking for her; one is her very uptight academic boyfriend Rafa (Rafael Spregelburd), with whom she does not have one single scene in the film, and the other is stolid, unsmiling married man Chicho (Ezequiel Pierri) who was helping with the project that obsessed Laura before her disappearance. Rafa suspects, with good reason, that Laura and Chicho were in love, something which the audience is to witness – not in flashback exactly, because episodes are shown out of order, but in a dramatic present tense. Rafa’s quest is not only to find her but also the truth about Laura’s possible infidelity.
