The Argentine city of Trenque Lauquen, 276 miles from the bustle of Buenos Aires, had a population of about 40,000 as of the 2001 census. As depicted in the film Trenque Lauquen, the city is an ordinary-looking place that appears much like remote suburbia: rural expanses and a modest commercial district broken by architecture that varies from Greek-inspired municipal buildings to nondescript industrial parks. The latest from the Argentinian collective El Pampero Cine observes a handful of characters as they navigate this seemingly commonplace region, and it wanders with them in a quiet, effortless enchantment that finds the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Trenque Lauquen is divided into two main sections, with chapter divisions telling a nested narrative within each part. It opens with two men in the middle of a conversation we don’t yet understand. Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd) is the older of the two, and he’s on his cell phone with somebody named Clara, explaining to Clara that everything is clear. It’s a gentle wordplay evident even in translation, and that sets the patter for the film’s unassuming way of drawing you in. The other man is Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri), and if Rafael seems to be the one of the pair who’s calling the shots, this sad sack seems to be along for the ride. It soon becomes clear that the men are looking for Laura (Laura Paredes), who has gone missing, perhaps stealing Ezequiel’s car, though throughout the film he clarifies that she just borrowed it. Who are these men, and what is their relationship to Laura? And who is Laura?
Director Laura Citarella, who co-wrote the script with star Paredes and also appears as an actress, lets the viewer lean in to figure out what’s going on, and the initial tone she generates is that of being lost. The viewer is kind of lost in the narrative, and so are the characters, and as the camera tracks the men’s search through the town, you get the tangible sense of driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood. If that sounds like quintessential slow cinema, it is, but this is no hard slog. As chapters shed light on the individual wandering stories, a fascinating literary mystery unfolds. Laura’s research as a botanist leads her to the local library, where a new challenge appears: hidden between the pages of books donated by a particular estate are a series of love letters dating from the early to late ‘60s, a fevered paper trail that suddenly runs cold. In this backtracking we see the relationship between Chico and Laura, and as they try to unravel an epistolary puzzle that has quickly consumed them, they soon find themselves…well, let’s not spoil things.
The previous film from El Pampero Cine was the wildly sprawling 2018 La Flor, a six-part, 13-and-a-half hour marathon that maybe wanders a little too far afield by the end, but that you’d be happy to keep going indefinitely. Paredes was one of the central performers in La Flor, and given that film’s variations on a theme, using a core set of actresses in revolving roles, Trenque Lauquen feels in some ways like La Flor, Part 7. It’s slow and meandering but, at least in the first section, it moves fairly quickly: one becomes invested in the central search even without knowing the why or even the who.
And as Paredes got some of the most extensive material in La Flor, here she continues to make an impression without seeming to try, displaying subtle gestures in quiet moments, leaning into a car’s rearview mirror to show a silent contemplation, evoking a powerful mood even with her back to the camera. She has an unusually strong presence—perfectly ordinary in one sense, but once she establishes herself, her absence is felt when she’s not onscreen; as Rafael and Chico wonder what happened to her, so do we.
There are inevitable longueurs as we dive further into Laura’s story, but some amount of sleepwalking is crucial to the tale, and to the sense that (if to a lesser extent than La Flor) we’re watching a film that covers as much of the human experience as you can get to in one work. Trenque Lauquen is about storytelling, life and death and love, things that science can explain and things that can never be explained. It’s melancholy, but frequently droll, the humor meted out in the large scale of daydreaming flashbacks to the intimate scale of death’s head croissants, the pastry appearing at regular intervals as some kind of narrative metaphor for the layered and mostly sweet (if sometimes savory) plot. As Laura’s professional activities shift from soil samples to sweet nothings, the examination of fertile ground turns to fertile loins and imagination. Visuals shift too from banal suburbs to the allure of musty old things to the beauty of nature, with breathtaking landscapes bursting out like a long-awaited sunrise.
In production notes, El Pampero Cine members Pierri, Ingrid Pokropek and Citarella call Trenque Lauquen “a mutant film,” but it’s far more accessible than that sounds. You may balk at its length, but the time flies by like a long, slow mystery, never resolved but always intriguing.
Photo courtesy of The Cinema Guild
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