'Jauja' Is a Mystical South American Western

In South American folklore, Jauja is a paradisiacal land of milk and honey. Travelers are drawn to it like moths to a flame, but all who seek it get lost along the way. In Lisandro Alonso's Jauja, Viggo Mortensen is a Danish captain named Dinesen scouting the Patagonian coast of Argentina in the late 19th Century.

The plot is as sparse as the landscape, with both containing a great deal of overwhelming beauty. Dinesen works alongside a lecherous lieutenant who's taken a liking to Ingeboreg, his teenage daughter. But the multilingual army man protects his only child like a hawk, of course, and will have none of it. While trying to keep the older man as far away from young Inge as possible, she absconds with a soldier closer to her own age under cover of nightfall. Dinesen goes against everyone's advice by chasing after her once he realizes what's happened and (spoiler alert) gets lost along the way.

What follows is an exploratory western in the same spare, philosophical vein as Meek's Cutoff. Brightly colored dresses and drab army coats alike stand in sharp contrast to the volcanic beach that Dinesen and the rest of his unit are initially stationed on. Grave danger awaits among the elements, past the point where encroaching civilization has exerted its influence, and yet there's always time for a tall tale or long-winded discussion.

Oftentimes, in these conversations, people speak in hushed tones of a man named Zuluaga, the way Colonel Kurtz is alluded to in Apocalypse Now—the wild has absorbed him and turned him into a beast, a fate that could just as easily await Dinesen. Alonso takes great pains to make us aware of all the things that could go wrong while only showing brief glimpses of these eventualities.

With its boxy aspect ratio, contemplative pacing, and elliptical narrative, Jauja is very much a film that requires viewers to adapt to its wavelength rather than the other way around. Doing so proves surprisingly easy, not to mention rewarding. Many subtitle-averse fidgeters won't take to Alonso's minimalism kindly, but there's a staying power to his meditative approach that may take some by surprise: Jauja washes over you like a gentle wave, forceful yet soothing.

Ugly behavior notwithstanding, it's also a film of great beauty. Every shot is picture-perfect, which makes sense considering the rounded edges give the impression of an old photograph found tucked between the pages of an old album. Though we're very aware that what we're watching took place long ago, Jauja also feels unstuck in time. Families, countries—all must start somewhere, and a craggy, harsh landscape like this will work as well as anywhere else.

Mortensen (whose fluent Spanish is one of the movie's many unexpected rewards) lends a soft-spoken authority to the role of Dinesen. Left to his own devices and alone in the elements, this man used to order and control is forced to confront both himself and the possibility that he may never find what he's looking for—his daughter. Rational explanations are scarce in the uncharted vastness, while increasingly unexplainable happenings abound. The further Dinesen gets from home, the more intriguing his story becomes.

Late in the film, Dinesen comes across a wandering dog. The majestic canine leads him to a cave holding a sagacious old lady whose cryptic musings point Dinesen in the right direction spiritually, though not necessarily physically. The immediate impulse is to think her a figment of either Dinesen or Alonso's imagination, an ambiguity that, like most others in the film, goes unaddressed. She's like an agent of his own subconscious there to remind him of what he knows to be true about himself and his failings but can never say aloud. Our hero is lost in more ways than one.

"What is it that makes a life function and move forward?" the woman asks as her visitor leaves her rocky abode. Though we don't get an explicit answer from either one of them, the dreamlike ambiguity of the closing interlude provides certain clues. Time is really a flat circle in Jauja, whose ending loops back to its beginning in a simple, quietly powerful way. There's a sense of loss to be sure, but also a feeling of having returned to something primal and familiar. For Alonso, there are traces of the past to be found in the present—some comforting, some melancholy, all enchanting.

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