Eureka

In his 2022 masterpiece Pacifiction, which I had a hand in programming and which I still cannot get out of my head, Albert Serra for the first time in his career finds himself in possession of the money and production resources to make a major international art movie, which is what he does, as though he had always been quietly waiting for the inevitable moment. Pacifiction is like the earlier Serra features in theme and preoccupation exclusively; the form and mode are branching out, hardly looking back. On the other hand, in 2023's Eureka, Argentinean director Lisandro Alonso, who I've also helped program, absorbs the opportunity to spend and deploy more in order to stencil the outline of a more or less conventional international and generations-spanning art movie and then superimpose his own semi-transparent map so that a navigable system can begin to open up—different topographies will be made to do their different jobs and be readymade and permanent in their proper respective places. In the sections set in the United States, Alonso tells a visually and iconographically familiar story of crime, punishment, poverty, and moral fatigue. He moves much more like himself as a director, even when out on a limb, than he does a commercial film director, and naturally a routine highway traffic stops takes approximately as long here as it would in real life. Because of the sometimes lethargic or opiated blocks of uneventful duration and because of the preponderance of blues, reds, and purples in the colour scheme, the stuff in Eureka set in the U.S. resembles very much to me the fascinating and decidedly Grand Guignol 2019 Nicolas Winding Refn series Too Old to Die Young, which none of the rest of movie does. You have to adapt to each eco-locality and space-in-itself. The landscapes and the topography assert their influence and the artist rests suspended in sensorial receptivity. Here Eureka draws attention repeatedly to a certain debt it owes Apichatpong Weerasethakul's sublime Memoria (2021), though Eureka is more an almanac and Memoria a zeroed-in death trip (for a world that's forgotten how to die and to grieve). To give Alonso his due credit, whereas we have recently seen no end of bad, offensively vapid, or just dizzying mainstream films in which the general state of fragmentation would have to be called extreme, from Babylon (2022) to Kinds of Kindness (2024) and even doubtlessly Emilia Pérez (2024), the work on display in Eureka is grounded, controlled, and everywhere evidence of an adept hand. It's a question I would imagine James Joyce asking: how does one use language to articulate for and of the jungle? The adept replies: it depends. Jacques Rivette, our perennial saint, seems to forever have the cleanest and most decisive cinematic hand when it comes to turning one soil, one nation, one city, one room, one girl, infinitesimally downward and inward, each little compartment, into its own fanciful and bustling space-time.