New York Film Festival 60 Screenings 6

Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)

As a passionate devotee of John Waters' theory, espoused in his epochal 1983 "Guilty Pleasures" column for Film Comment (reprinted in Crackpot), that art film publicists should adopt the promotion  practices of exploitation filmmakers, I see no use in sugarcoating the difficulty of art cinema. So perhaps I can sell the 250-minute Argentinian Trenque Lauquen to the potentially considerate by quoting this five-star Letterboxd blurb from one Jesse Catherine Webber: "This is about puzzles, then about meeting a cool lesbian couple and wondering if you would work as a throuple, then about going for a really long walk." That's truth in advertising, folks. Except it misses so much more. Told in 12 chapters, Trenque Lauquen is an extended homage to L'Avventura (Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1960) given how both films center on the questions surrounding the disappearance of a woman rather than any resolution. The joy sparked by Citarella's epic inheres in determining how fragments of story may or may not fit together, sort of like rummaging through a box into which pieces from several different puzzles have been poured. As stately as the film is paced, Citarella brings excitement by giving up more information than we can process in one sitting. Just as we're comfortable spinning four or five plates, she places another one in our hand: new flower species, love letters hidden in books, a feminist radio program, an extraordinary, lengthy voice recording from the lost woman, the possible existence of a Loch Ness-type creature in a lake in the titular city, more. And, indeed, it ends with an extending walking sequence which, as my pal Jody concurred, recalls the wanderings of Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985). Citarella produced Mariano Llinás' 14-hour La Flor (2018) and if you were lucky enough to take in that behemoth, you might recognize the same Rivette-like games with narrative here. But Trenque Lauquen is a more assured film with enormous replay potential. Get obsessed.

Grade: A