Laura Citarella’s lengthy romantic conundrum refuses to tie up its many loose ends but her film-making language ensures that cult status beckons
Laura Citarella’s movie is a coolly unhurried four hours-plus, split into two parts of around two hours each; it is from the same producer, in fact, as Argentinian auteur Mariano Llinás’s legendary 13-and-a-half hour film La Flor. Compared with that, Trenque Lauquen – whose title means “round lake” and is a city in Buenos Aires province – is a mere cine-haiku; but it is still a domestic epic, a giant puzzle, a whopping solutionless mystery and a meandering shaggy dog story with a hint of Borges or As Byatt’s Possession. And Citarella might have mixed these influences with Lynch or even David Robert Mitchell’s divisive noir Under the Silver Lake. Yet for all its deadpan charm, there is something here which I couldn’t quite make friends with,...
Laura Citarella’s movie is a coolly unhurried four hours-plus, split into two parts of around two hours each; it is from the same producer, in fact, as Argentinian auteur Mariano Llinás’s legendary 13-and-a-half hour film La Flor. Compared with that, Trenque Lauquen – whose title means “round lake” and is a city in Buenos Aires province – is a mere cine-haiku; but it is still a domestic epic, a giant puzzle, a whopping solutionless mystery and a meandering shaggy dog story with a hint of Borges or As Byatt’s Possession. And Citarella might have mixed these influences with Lynch or even David Robert Mitchell’s divisive noir Under the Silver Lake. Yet for all its deadpan charm, there is something here which I couldn’t quite make friends with,...
- 12/4/2023
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Laura Paredes as Laura in Trenque Lauquen. Laura Citrella on writing with her star: 'It was great, because I had a partner to whom I could talk every day about the film and who also was the main character' Photo: El Pampero Cine Laura Citrella’s Trenque Lauquen - which opens today (April 21) in New York before screening elsewhere in the US - is the sort of work you can kick back and relax into. Her story, which runs across more than four hours and two films, takes viewers not only on a journey into multiple stories through the consideration of a single life but also on a walk across a cinematic landscape, from historical romance to mystery drama and something altogether more fantastical.
The story is driven by, though not always centred upon, Laura, a botanist who is collecting orchid samples in Trenque Lauquen - a real place in Argentina.
The story is driven by, though not always centred upon, Laura, a botanist who is collecting orchid samples in Trenque Lauquen - a real place in Argentina.
- 4/21/2023
- by Amber Wilkinson
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Laura Paredes in Trenque Lauquen.Fittingly for a film tracking a botanist along her quest for an ultra-rare flower, Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen unfurls like the network of a rose, each of its myriad tales unveiling and spilling into the next. Stretched across 250 minutes, split into twelve chapters, and divided into two parts, the film is a maze of forking paths, the cinematic equivalent of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, who hovers above it as an essential touchstone. This is, after all, a Pampero Cine production, the Buenos Aires collective that spawned Mariano Llinás’s 2018 epic La Flor, another sprawling multi-genre pastiche that looked to the rhizomatic writings by Borges and other Río de la Plata scribes for inspiration. Back in 1969, together with director Hugo Santiago and fellow writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges co-wrote Invasión, a portrait of a fictional city, Aquileia, under an endless siege. Modeled on Buenos Aires,...
- 10/10/2022
- MUBI
Paris-based sales agency and production company Luxbox has snagged the rights to “Trenque Lauquen,” the fourth feature by Argentine director-producer Laura Citarella, ahead of its Sept. 8 world premiere in the Venice Horizons sidebar.
The pick-up continues Luxbox’s strong line in Latin American titles, seen this year in Sundance entry “Dos Estaciones” and Cannes Directors’ Fortnight title “1976” as well as “Pornomelancholia,” the latest documentary feature from award-winning director Manuel Abramovich, which competes in San Sebastián.
Filmed in two parts, “Trenque Lauquen” begins with a couple of men, Rafael and Ezequiel, who are on the road, both searching for a woman, Laura, who has vanished.
Rafael claims to be her boyfriend while Ezequiel drove her around as she investigated the mystery behind multiple love letters that she discovered hidden in library books. Flashbacks of the time Ezequiel spends with her reveals that he has fallen in love with Laura as he...
The pick-up continues Luxbox’s strong line in Latin American titles, seen this year in Sundance entry “Dos Estaciones” and Cannes Directors’ Fortnight title “1976” as well as “Pornomelancholia,” the latest documentary feature from award-winning director Manuel Abramovich, which competes in San Sebastián.
Filmed in two parts, “Trenque Lauquen” begins with a couple of men, Rafael and Ezequiel, who are on the road, both searching for a woman, Laura, who has vanished.
Rafael claims to be her boyfriend while Ezequiel drove her around as she investigated the mystery behind multiple love letters that she discovered hidden in library books. Flashbacks of the time Ezequiel spends with her reveals that he has fallen in love with Laura as he...
- 9/6/2022
- by Anna Marie de la Fuente
- Variety Film + TV
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