Trenque Lauquen (2022), Dir. Laura Citarella, 135 & 139 mins, Blu-Ray
There’s a missing woman, two men searching for her in the town of Trenque Lauquen; she got obsessed by a strangers romantic, almost pornographic, letters, hidden in various library books from decades before. Something odd, maybe even supernatural, has been discovered at the lake, and she knows it is hidden in an attic. One of the two men looking for her is hiding a secret from the other.
There’s a lot to enjoy in Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen, but there’s a lot to frustrate, too. Is it brave or self-indulgent, confounding or engrossing? For my part, I’m caught somewhere in-between. I thought the central mystery was fascinating and don’t even mind that it is left open-ended (regards whatever happened to the the woman who disappeared) but I have to wonder – is taking over four hours to get there, as well as revealing two further mysteries neither of which get really explained or resolved either, simply taking things too far? Is a pact made with its audience being broken when NOTHING is explained? I don’t know- I was aware from early word about this film that its mysteries would not necessarily be solved, so that didn’t surprise me, but I have to confess I still found it irritating. David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive is pretty obtuse, but it makes sense if the viewer works at it enough. I’m not certain if, however hard the viewer tries, this film can ever make sense. I’m not sure its meant to.
Maybe people don’t mind mysteries unsolved. Maybe people find such things enthralling, like some endless challenge; what did the X-Files say… the Truth is Out There? But maybe it isn’t; maybe its a con, the clues don’t mean anything at all. Which raises the suspicion, are the film-makers making fools of their audience?
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe its a case of enjoying the journey, not the destination. I mean, there’s plenty to enjoy, The cast is terrific, I didn’t at all mind the slow pace, self-indulgent as it may be, and I appreciated the cinematography, the sense of time and place. There’s some wonderful film-making here, but to what end?
Maybe the real point of this film, at least what I took from it, is that we are all transitory; the world remains. The streets, the fields, the sky above, but we… we come into the world, we spend awhile in it, and then we’re gone. And maybe that’s the mystery? We aren’t supposed to know who the lovers were, or what happened to them or why, or what the strange creature was, that was found in the lake, where it came from, or where it went, or indeed what happened to Laura, where she went, or why. There’s some things we can never know. The people that stand next to you at a bus stop, or walking down the aisle in the supermarket… you can never know them, the how or the why, where they came from or where they will end up. Mysteries are everywhere. But does it need a four hour plus film in two parts, spread over two nights leaving tantalising mysteries hanging in an unravelling narrative, to tell us this?
Twin Peaks: The Return was over sixteen hours, so maybe Trenque Lauquen should be applauded for its brevity.
the ghost of 82 
This is a weird sort of non-review. You could pick so many themes to talk about, so many resonances between Laura’s experiences and the mysteries she encounters, or even creates, but half your review is just iterating what the film isn’t, and half complaining about “nothing being solved.” (See True Dectective Season One – “this is a world where nothing is solved.”)
The unfinished house with her boyfriend/the creature’s room – these are metaphors for the unfinished world, which Laura enters in the final section – not inhabiting someone else’s space, but one uniquely her own, and which, by nature of all human life, is inaccessible to others
Lady Godiva/Alexandra Kollontai (sex as a revolutionary political method)
The mystery of the letters/Laura’s absence/the creature’s hiddenness – this is the hiddenness of our inner worlds – which hardly any films every paint in more honest way than in Trenque Lauquen
Also, the flower Laura needs to finish her project, the last one to identify and catalogue, is a literal Lacanian objet petit a (unattainable object of desire). And the film, in not supplying this flower or the “answer” (Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris – “There are no answers, only choices.”) is identifying the “solve the world, solve everything” mentality as limiting, responsible for ideas of ownership and “the right answer for everything.”
The men casually going way over their time in the radio station and the overt discussion of one of the station owners being an utter creep, the idea of text as subtly misgynistic itself – i.e. no books about female scientists in the local library, the letters being “his” – listen to them being quoted!!! HE repeats her words for us. The narrative being owned by men, or rather, narrative being the principle of endings, or statements of finality. None of which are really honest expressions of human life.
The challenge presented to the idea of ownership at all, in reference to the burned down estate the books came from, or regarding the “stolen” car and that Laura presented the keys to someone not in any “offical” capacity anywhere, but they still got to the right person. But moreso the challenge to the idea of ownership of people, or relationships – also Godiva, also Kollontai, also that the woman didn’t want the creature to be “owned” or subjected to batteries of tests, also the boyfriend’s imaginary “ownership” of Laura, or the potential lover’s ownership of Laura, or the institution’s ownership of Laura.
This film is a stunning encapsulation of, and rejection of, colonialism, misogyny and any number of elements of modern capitalist societies that will sacrifice everything for the goal of the “product” at the end, the answer, the commodity.
Congratulations for missing the entire film.
Well, thankyou for that, I appreciate the time it took for you to write your comment, and I find your points very interesting. I still contend that the film is too long and… well, I guess it either flew right over me or was just too deliberately obtuse, because I’m still conflicted regards its ‘broken’ narrative in the ‘traditional’ sense. Perhaps its just that I didn’t expect the film to be so experimental. I understand that the film can be seen as a half-empty vessel to be filled with the viewer’s subjective reasoning (it becoming whatever the viewer ‘sees’ it to be), but I can’t help but feel that’s still a failure of the storyteller.