Jauja - film review

In Lisandro Alonso's bewitching Jauja - a film from Argentina combining slow-drip minimalism with scenic beauty and poetic non sequitur - Viggo Mortensen plays a Danish army engineer in 19th-century South America. When his teenage daughter is abducted by a local rebel leader he clumps after her on horse and foot, across wild terrain sometimes teeming with non-incident, sometimes punctuated with a stolen horse, a violent killing or a meeting with a cave-dwelling clairvoyant crone (Ghita Norby of Bergman's Best Intentions, barely recognisable). The crone might just possibly be Mortensen's daughter, wife or a hallucinatory mixture of both.

Confused? You have barely started. The film's final section, jumping context altogether, is on a level with the 18th-century bedroom epilogue in Kubrick's 2001. We first think: "What the hell . . . ?" Then we think: "Wow. I think I like this." Is the sequence a ploy to complete the film's narrative circle, extending it into flashback? Or is it an extra loop of that circle beckoning us to new beyonds?

Whatever your wonderstruck interpretation, Mortensen, grizzled of gaze and gait, empowered with a weird grace, has seldom been better. His hero is a southern-climes variant on Shakespeare's Gloucester: a man wandering with visionary blindness across the map of privation, or of his own mind and soul, or of a Galapagos-like fantasy realm where individual and collective evolutions have combined in some magical, mutually nourishing dream.

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