The fifth day of the 67th Cannes Film Festival turned out to be the richest. No, not because of the much-anticipated "Maps to the Stars", a clammy Hollywood satire by David Cronenberg featuring joyless limo sex between Julianne Moore and Robert Pattinson — God bless California. The riches, instead, came from a small Argentinean film "Jauja" by Lisandro Alonso, who’s now confirmed his place in the rank of cinema visionaries. I seriously hope that one of the film festivals in Thailand would bring this gem to our shores, because the hypnotic magnificence and Patagonian inferno of "Jauja" only works best on the cinema screen.
For a start, the film was shot in the vintage academy size (or the square size), with the four edges smoothened as in an ancient picture frame. This isn’t a stylistic quirk, but a choice that complements the spatial and temporal concept of the film. Taking place in 1882 in the vast expanse of Patagonia, the story centres on Captain Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen), a Danish engineer who arrives at this remote part of the Earth with his teenage daughter. When the daughter runs away with a local solider, Dinesen sets out into the unknown territory, scarcely populated and yet infested by rumours and myths, and probably by the melancholic ghosts of the past as well as the future.
Jauja - A journey of a Danish engineer and his daughter from Denmark to an unknown desert that exists in a realm beyond the confines of civilisation.
Like most films that dream their way to transcendence, "Jauja", which is the name of a mythological land believed to be full of happiness, defies easy description. This film is a history (or memory?) of the place and the time locked inside it - and in that way Alonso has joined his kindred spirits such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bela Tarr and Lav Diaz. And for all its eccentricities and quiet magic, “Jauja” is also one of the most beautiful and touching films showing at Cannes this year. (Well, it should be noted here that the film is not in the main Competition, but the second-tier Un Certain Regard, where things have become more interesting each day).