Eureka

EUREKA   ***1/2

Lisandro Alonso

2023

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

IDEA:  A shapeshifting, time-bending, magical realist exploration of Native American experience.

BLURB:  Eureka contains one of those legitimately astonishing form-breaking moments you see once in a while in the feature-length art film, a consciousness-torquing rupture that’s like the filmmaker pulling off a magic trick. Of course, it basically is; it’s the magic of a medium that can reorganize time, space, and the spectator’s perceptual economy. Lisandro Alonso no doubt exploits this ability in part because of the thrill of it (and it is thrilling to see!), but he also wants to get at something deeper about how film can unsettle the language of the status quo. His project, continuing explicitly from his previous film, Jauja, is to denude hegemonic Western narratives of their mythical heroic trappings. Eureka goes further than Jauja in that it actually centers indigenous subjects, although this isn’t apparent until the aforementioned schism, a masterful fakeout that yanks the film from a seemingly typical Western (albeit a grimly deglamorized one) into a contemporary realist drama layered with the traces of colonial violence. Over the rest of the film, which has in store one further and more metaphysical spatiotemporal shift, Alonso encourages us to find parallels across his different idioms. What is most prominent — from the severe argentine frames of the Viggo Mortensen-led Western to the frigid, durational tableaux of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to the lush but endangered Amazon — is a history of American indigeneity pockmarked by abuse and displacement. Alonso and his co-writers complicate “positive” representation by showing how these things don’t always come from the top down but are internalized and perpetuated within a community, as in the weary, ethically dubious law enforcement of a Lakota officer (Alaina Clifford) operating within a seriously compromised socioeconomic structure. Perversely, ironically titled, Eureka pointedly offers mostly lacunae and irresolution in its entrancing cosmic tapestry, but there is also startling, poignant clarity in the microscopic human detail it rescues from the gaps.