At an American school gym, a French woman who is stuck with a malfunctioning car in South Dakota gets to meet a teenager practicing free throws on the basketball court who tells the woman that her nickname is Magic Johnson. The lady in this movie “Eureka”, who is being portrayed by Chiara Mastroianni says to the girl that she is from France and then asks her, “And you? Where are you from?” She responds with, “Good question. I wonder that every day,” even though they are conversing about an indigenous reservation.
This dilemma is what surrounds “Eureka” in a nutshell. The center of concern for theber is,” which is a sometimes beautiful, sometimes charming, and sometimes beautiful. The Eldorado of Argentinian Cinema has always been Lisandro Alonso. It’s a work whose charming turns are best appreciated in an unhurried mood. Because much of this is slow development, if there is indeed development at all. The initial twenty-five minutes aside, this is not a film that offers much in the narrative propulsion department.
Those uncleared impressions in the early minutes introduce the image of an Indigenous man to a cliff, singing, I presume (there aren’t any subtitles), the songs of his culture. From there, we are offered a sort of Western, one in which the indigenous people are stunningly omitted.
A vigilante with a purpose is depicted by Viggo Mortenson as a solitary figure. He kills a man who refuses him entry into a room and, presumably, he eliminates the two other cadavers we see him sleeping with later in the film. Mastroianni’s character is reminiscent of Joan Crawford’s interpretation of Vienna in the classic ‘Johnny Guitar’ There is an offscreen Irish tune that further adds depth and suggests a take on Marlene Dietrich’s Backroom singer from ‘Destry Rides Again’. To everyone’s surprise, the performer is a nun. This area’s dry topography tends to overwhelm the individuals residing in it with the sky being the dominating feature in over half of the filmed images. They serve as a reminder of the Simarro shot Westerns made by Sergio Leone but in black and white and in pair with the Academy ratio. This montage is put together in a manner that broadens the sense of a small-scale story with the contemporary year placed in South Dakota.
As a weather anchor, Mastroianni once again appears in the film as herself. She is working on a Japanese TV set which isn’t very captivating as she speaks about the region where ‘our beautiful native community resides,’ a statement that has an underlying meaning of centuries of contempt. Furthermore, within that region, an Indigenous woman cop is trying hard to control the situation but seems overwhelmed doing her best to help the drug-addicted natives living in a dirty environment while her niece seeks to rise above the dirt and free throws.
This “verisimilitude” that Alonso employs seems to be at risk of generating absolute alienation to the viewer. There is a poignant beauty in the fact that a cop is portrayed by Alaina Cliffords looking out from a parked vehicle while a woman in her custody is behind complaining that the cuffs are too tight. One aspect of the Eureka endeavor that is very bothersome but not purposefully is how painfully slow a prison visit scene is presented.
An hour and a half into the movie, the potential title character is introduced. She’s a bird; a heron-like figure who zooms past an earthwork sculpture into a dissolve that reveals a mountain range and forest. This transitions into the final sequence, which takes place among a different group of Indigenous people; the ones who come from South America. This sequence is a bit more plot-driven than the center sequence, and it does shift down a more grim, crime-thriller-with-mysticism angle towards the middle.
A strong visual of an otherwise pristine mountain stream with a crunched Pepsi can toss inside serves as a powerful metaphor through the utter displeasure the filmmaker portrays.
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