In a school gymnasium, a French woman stranded with her broken-down car in South Dakota meets a teenage boy practicing free throws on the basketball court, who tells the woman that his nickname is Magic Johnson. The woman, played by Chiara Mastroianni, tells the girl that she is here from France and asks, “And you? Where are you from?” She replies, “Good question. I ask myself that every day,” even though they are speaking on an Indian reservation.
This conundrum is the crux of “Eureka,” Argentine director Lisandro Alonso’s sometimes beautiful, sometimes seductive, sometimes disconcerting triptych about the material and political question of colonialism and the spiritual question of what home is. It’s a film best received in a relaxed frame of mind, because much of it unfolds at a slow burn, if it unfolds at all. Despite the first twenty-five minutes, it’s not a film that offers much in the way of narrative drive.
In those first few minutes, we see raw images of an indigenous person on a rock, singing, we assume (there are no subtitles), the songs of his people. Afterwards, we find ourselves in a kind of western, in which the indigenous people are conspicuous by their absence.
Viggo Mortenson plays a lonely, reasonably determined man on a mission. He shoots the man who won’t let him have a room and, presumably, dispatches the same way the two corpses we later see in the bed where he has slept. The segment is indulgent while also demolishing genre clichés. Mastroianni plays a character who resembles Joan Crawford’s Vienna in “Johnny Guitar.” When we hear an Irish song being sung off-screen, we think perhaps of a variation on Marlene Dietrich’s backroom singer in “Destry Rides Again.” The singer, it turns out, is a nun. And so on. The barren landscapes here tend to dwarf the people in them (there are many shots where the sky takes up more than half the frame) and are reminiscent of the Spanish-filmed Westerns by Sergio Leone, if they had been made in black and white and in the Academy format. The sense of pastiche is underlined by the way this sequence is transformed into a widescreen, color story set in contemporary South Dakota.
Here, Mastroianni is back in town as herself, shooting a Western. But there isn’t much drama in the contemporary world. A TV weatherwoman gives a forecast for a region “where our beautiful Native community resides”; that phrase encapsulates centuries of condescension. In that region, a dedicated but clearly exhausted Native policewoman deals with drug-addicted Natives living in squalor while her niece practices free throws and searches for some kind of higher ground.
Alonso’s sense of verisimilitude contrasts with the potential for viewer alienation. There is a poignant visual beauty in a long shot of the policewoman, played by Alaina Clifford, sitting in her parked vehicle looking out the window while a detained woman sitting behind her complains incessantly that her handcuffs are too tight and that she needs to go to the bathroom. A decidedly slow, drawn-out prison visit sequence drives you crazy, but not necessarily in an intentional way.
An hour and a half into the film, our possible main character appears. It is a bird, a heron-like creature that flies past an earth sculpture and into the image showing a forest and a mountain range. This leads to the final sequence, which takes place among a different group of indigenous people, those residing in South America. This sequence is a bit more plot-driven than the central one, and takes a sombre, crime-thriller turn with mysticism.
A stark shot of a crushed Pepsi dumped into an otherwise pristine mountain stream, an image both striking and visually powerful, encapsulating the quiet outrage of the filmmaker’s perspective.