Jauja movie review & film summary (2015)

There is a story: Danish Captain Gunnar Dinesen (Mortensen) leads a band of men assigned to kill Aboriginals living in the country's desert. During his sojourn there, his daughter, Ingeborg (Viilbjørk Malling Agger), who is stationed with him, runs off with a young soldier named Corto (Misael Saavedra), causing Dinesen to take off in pursuit. This sounds like a variant of the Western wilderness-kidnap film, and the scenery certainly would seem ripe for that.

But Alonso and his cinematographer Timo Salminen aren't interested in traditional beats. As the story moves us from calm to violence and back to calm again at the end, the storytelling, indeed the cutting from scene to scene (there are few scenes with more than one shot), thwarts any expectations we carried into the film, not just in terms of story, but rhythm. You never know how long a shot will last or what it'll emphasize.

The movie opens with a static image of two characters sitting on a rock for several minutes, and continues that way even when the story allegedly kicks in and Dinesen rides off to find his daughter. A shocking act of violence is revealed as aftermath, and you don't even see the moment of discovery in closeup. A conversation between Dinesen and a hateful underling who describes the aboriginals as "coconut-heads" and blithely argues for their extermination is chilling not just because of the content of the conversation, but because of the way Alonso lets Dinesen exit the frame while staying on the underling for a long moment, letting us observe his utter disgust at a man who thinks less of him because he's a white supremacist.

As in films by Werner Herzog, Terrence Malick and Theo Angelopoulos, the filmmaking encourages us to think less about what motivates the characters (their drives are often hazy) than their existence within the context of a land and an era that is ultimately indifferent to their dramas. The slow (or "deliberate") pace makes the mind wander away from the absence of expected values and focus instead on the presence of ones you don't normally get from scripted features. You may find yourself noticing a soldier's blazing red trousers against the green lichens and thinking about how inappropriate, and somehow strangely arrogant, they are, and how this juxtaposition of colors seems to summarize the mentality of those who would try to invade and subjugate terrain they barely understand.

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