Eureka

 Lisandro Alonso's 2023 Eureka begins with a pastiche of a spaghetti Western, cuts to a Frederick Wiseman style documentary about law enforcement on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, and, then, ends among gold miners in the jungles of Brazil.  The film is a sonata of false starts and misdirection -- protagonists search for people in vain and narratives are truncated into meaningless fragments.  The picture is frustrating and unresolved -- this isn't an accident, not a "bug" as they say but a "feature".  I can't ascertain the point of the movie which is overlong and portentous, but the film's pointlessness is, apparently, what it is all about.  

In the opening scene, an Indian shaman is filmed on a rock coast, declaiming some sort of chant to the sun that rises through slit in the cliffs.  He walks along the beach.  (There is something intrinsically "wrong" or inauthentic about the way the Indian walks -- this is characteristic of the movie; the way people act and move never seems to be realistic, but isn't stylized either; it's like watching bad actors in a home movie.)  A "man with no name" is shown in a wagon, riding behind a woman dressed as a nun.  There's a baby's coffin the wagon with the gunman (played by Viggo Mortenson).  The nun tells the bad man that she can't take him into town and leaves him to walk through the desert, apparently sending him in the wrong direction.  (The situation channels the plot of Two Mules for Sister Sara, a Clint Eastwood "oater" directed by Don Siegel).  After being lost for while, the bad hombre finds the town, a miserable collection of frayed, tumble-down buildings where drunks are strewn in the muddy streets, naked prostitutes gambol at a trough, and perpetual gunfights cause the air to ring out with shots fired.  The nun turns out to be a whore and the saloon is full of topless floozies.  The gun man walks past a number of corpses of people shot down in the street, kills the sheriff who has rocked back in his chair like Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine and, then, enters a hotel.  He spends the night in a room with two corpses with bullets in their brain pans wallowing in bed, waiting for dawn, when he shoots a couple more people and, then, bursts into a room where a villain is bathing in a zinc tub.  The gunman demands that the villain tell where his daughter is.  Someone mentions "El Coronel" and there is a bird feather on a table.  The villain refuses to talk but the daughter emerges from the next room, points her revolver at her father and says that she isn't going to leave the town and intends to stay.  This part of the film is made like a low-budget spaghetti western, or, perhaps, like Jodorowsky's El Topo -- it's over-the-top and seems intended to be ridiculous.  The image is formatted in an odd oblong and the film stock is black and white.  It turns out that we are watching a movie on TV in a modest government issue pre-fab house on an Indian reservation in South Dakota.  A handsome lady cop is suiting up for her night shift as a patrol officer for the Lakota tribal police.  Her niece Sadie is with her and says that she intends to go to the High School to practice basketball -- it turns out that Sadie is the coach of the local High School team.  This is at Kyle, South Dakota, the tribal headquarters for the Lakota-speaking Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation.  A newscast informs us that a blizzard is coming and that it's 19 below zero.  The lady cop attends to calls to which she is dispatched.  First, she goes to a squalid house where everyone is drunk or stoned on methamphetamines.  An old man mutters about someone lighting his dog on fire and spouts drunken gibberish to the police officer.  There are lots of little kids in the house sleeping four to a bed and drunks sprawled all over the place passed-out -- the bodies lying on the floor looks similar to the carnage in the depraved town in the black and white movie.  The officer is searching for a missing child, McKenzie, but no one knows anything about her.  On the highway, the cop encounters a tourist whose car is stalled out -- a potentially deadly situation in the lethal cold.  The tourist is a French woman who has come onto the reservation to scout locations for a movie that she is involved in producing (presumably Eureka which, in fact, lists some French companies as producers).  The cop takes the French woman to the High School (why?) where Sadie is perfecting her free-throws in the basketball court.  The woman talks to Sadie and insults her with condescending comments about the reservation, and a wave of youth suicides.  Back on the snowy highways, the lady cop is called to a knife-fight between two women in another squalid trailer house.  She arrests one of the girls who says that she is pregnant and spends the next half hour harassing the officer about having to pee.  Driving to the tribal jail, the officer encounters a man so drunk he is passed-out in his car.  She arrests him as well and, then, proceeds to a casino, the Prairie Winds where there has been some kind of shoot-out.  A hotel room is badly vandalized.  The lady cop looks out the window and see the snow falling, blown in white sheets through the night by the icy wind.  Sadie, meanwhile, goes to the Law Enforcement Center at the tribal headquarters where she meets with her brother who is in jail.  She tells her brother that this will be their last meeting because she intends to go away;  The despatcher can't locate car 174, the call number for the lady cop, who now has gone missing.  He keeps trying to contact her by radio but she seems to have vanished.  It's dawn and Sadie goes to her grandfather's trailer house, another squalid shanty heated by a woodburning stove.  Her grandfather agrees to keep a promise he made to the morose young woman.  He gives her some herbal tea, goes out to tend to his ponies, and Sadie turns into a long-legged stork-like bird.  The bird flies away, pausing for a moment at the Crazy Horse monument sculpted into the side of the mountain near Custer, South Dakota -- the colossal carving makes Crazy Horse look like cross-eyed and mentally retarded -- near Custer,   In Brazil, some Indians in white robes are engaged in some kind of experiment with hallucinogenic drugs.  They explain their dreams to one another.  A girl named Lila is among the four or five young men.  (The crane from South Dakota is stalking around in the underbrush).  Two young men both dream about wooing Lila.  (We see excerpts from their dreams which are wholly realistic, not fantastical at all, and involve the boys swimming in a rock-girt pool next to a cascade.)  The boys fight over their dreamed encounters with Lila and one of the kids stabs the other to death.  The assailant,.then, packs up his little suitcase, incongruously located on top of a tangle of huge trees, and goes to work at a gold mine.  At the mine, by beginner's luck, the kid finds a number of gold nuggets -- he's allowed to keep some of the gold which he puts in a vial hanging around his neck.  The foreman tells the boy that two fellow workers are plotting to murder him for his gold.  So the kid, who now is sick with something like malaria, take his little brown suitcase and flees through the jungle.  He is told to go to the river and find someone called "el Coronel".  Half-dead with illness, the locates the man who loads him onto a canoe and, using a motor-boot engine, guides the little craft through narrow lagoons to a big river.  The kid can no longer walk and seems to be dying.  He is carried into a hut where a native healer, spits vodka on him, brushes his body with sage or some other sacred herb.  This turns him into a stork-like crane who then flies away.  In each of the three parts to this triptych, feathers make an appearance, presumably molted by the crane-like supernatural creature. 

Alonso favors shots with very long duration -- in these images, a character simply sits brooding on the mournful nature of things.  The pastiche of the spaghetti Western is somewhat amusing but not funny enough to be comical.  The lengthy sequence on the Indian reservation is shot in a scrupulously documentary style and seems highly realistic -- although the people walk around in deadly cold without hats or gloves.  The scenes in the Amazon jungle are interesting and there are intriguing glimpses as to the technology and practice of gold mining.  The device of characters turning into a stork and, then, simply flying away seems to be a cop-out, a way to engineer an escape from a plot impasse.  There is a dream-like consistency between the episodes -- people go missing and can't be found.  But there is no thematic thread connecting the episodes other than the rather mechanical presence of the huge reptilian bird, sometimes clacking its comically large beak as it stalks around like a spectral monster.