Trenque Lauquen Review: Laura Citarella’s Labyrinth of Labyrinths

Laura Citarella’s 260-minute Trenque Lauquen is divided into two films and a total of 12 chapters, a literary conceit that’s not foreign to the director’s native Argentine cinema. Indeed, even those unfamiliar with her earlier directorial efforts, such as Dog Lady, may know her as an actor in Mariano Llinás’s Extraordinary Stories and La Flor. Citarella’s new film operates along similarly Borgesian rhythms as Llinás’s opuses, introducing a basic story outline from which new narratives emerge like the parts of a matryoshka doll.

A biologist, Laura (Laura Paredes, who co-wrote the film), suddenly disappears, prompting an investigation that, hydra-like, raises three new questions for each that it answers. Complicating matters further is that the two characters who go searching for Laura aren’t detectives. Rather, Rafael (Rafael Sprgelburd), Laura’s older boyfriend, teams up with her co-worker (and possible paramour), Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri), to scour the city of Trenque Lauquen and its environs to ask if anyone has seen her. The first two chapters of the film consist of little more than the men driving around, the camera remaining in the passenger seat alongside Ezequiel as he gazes out at landmarks and staring at Rafael in the distance when he stops to query locals.

The men’s languid investigation is given an amusing counterpoint in Trenque Lauquen’s third section, which flashes back to show Laura becoming obsessed with two topics. The first, related to her job, involves her tracking down a new species of flower, and the second pivots on her chance discovery of old love letters hidden in library books, which drives her to examine all donated books from the same source to piece together more and more correspondence. Compared to Rafael and Ezequiel merely showing a photo of Laura to random strangers, Laura embarks on intense research to study each topic, exploring the flora all around the titular province near Buenos Aires while getting so worked up over the letters that she even reads the books in which they’re hidden for possible clues to the lovers’ identities and fates.

With the three characters thus established, the remainder of the film tracks the way that each person’s narrative intersects and spirals away from the others’ stories. As the men delve deeper into Laura’s absence, mysteries give way to new mysteries, ones that Citarella shoots in subtle shakeups of the film’s initially realist style. Speaking to Laura’s old boss, Rafael is clued into erratic behavior that she began to show, and the tenor of Citarella’s use of the long takes changes the tenor of Trenque Lauquen from that of a lilting country idyll to that of a paranoid thriller, with one long shot that bobs after the two people discussing Laura even recalling the opening surveilling shot of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.

As for Ezequiel, an extended flashback shows him becoming immersed in Laura’s quest to learn more about the Carmen and Paolo of the love letters and growing closer to Laura in the process. The film, then, approaches the budding attraction between Laura and Ezequiel as a kind of continuation of Carmen and Paolo’s relationship. Trenque Lauquen is shot with ample, warm natural light and with unobtrusive use of existing buildings in mostly daytime, but there’s an almost Brontean quality to this multidimensional love story. A lengthy montage of the two reading letters aloud set to Chopin’s “Grande Valse Brilliante” possesses an erotic charge that’s all the more incredible given that Carmen and Paolo remain unseen.

Minimal resources force Citarella to achieve such whimsical flourishes with little more than a change in camera movement or editing rhythm, and she uses equally understated glimpses at the actors’ muted performances to speak volumes about the characters’ inner selves. The bashful way that Rafael admits to strangers that he’s Laura’s boyfriend subtly hints at his self-consciousness over their age gap, while Ezequiel’s scenes with the woman emphasize his cautious attempts to gauge her interest in their increasing romantic tension.

As for Paredes, she captures Laura’s intense zeal for seeking answers with little more than an intent stare or facial tic to show her suddenly paying more attention to new information. When Ezequiel admits at one point that he’s become so invested in the love letters that he visited a local school based on a hunch that Carmen might have worked there, a brief reaction shot of Laura’s mouth slightly upturning into a smile of approval says more about her sudden intensified attraction to the man than an outright declaration of infatuation.

In the second of the film’s two major parts, Laura becomes the dominant focus as more and more of her activities leading up to and following her disappearance are revealed. Instead of providing closure to Laura’s established preoccupations, though, Trenque Lauquen sees her latching onto new and barely related oddities that arise in her questing, one of which includes the possible existence of a Loch Ness Monster-like creature near the region’s major lake.

The substance of each mystery that compels Laura is ultimately less important than the allure of chasing down answers and only finding more questions. Many artists have taken similarly postmodern notions of an impossible truth into realms of despair and madness, but Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes, of losing oneself as the catalyst for realizing no one has a set, permanent self to lose in the first place.