Trenque Lauquen 2023

With the strange disappearance of Laura, two colleagues, her older boyfriend, Rafael, and Ezequiel, learn of their recent discoveries, which may help them locate her. However, the story is bigger and stranger than they could imagine.

Review

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, or engage with fully. I think it is the way that the film jumps, or maybe shark-jumps, from one strange story to another after the intermission.