Critics reviews

A military officer drags himself across a blazing landscape where he does not belong. Time and space reveal themselves to be more malleable than was once presumed. Old relationships untangle and new ones form; obscured trails become harder to follow. But water keeps flowing, grass keeps growing, and rocks are worn by rain and wind. An inexact synopsis, perhaps, but that should at least get across the thrust of this sublime, oneiric movie.

There's a scene in The Knick where characters are blown away watching "The Big Swallow" in a kinetoscope. That's what I feel like watching Jauja—like I'm looking through a window into some mythic realm so unfamiliar it's spooky. The corners are rounded, the colors are yellowed, the exotic landscape is hiding all kinds of secrets.

Lisandro Alonso's Jauja should be seen on a big screen or not at all. Crucial scenes of this art house spectacle transpire in extreme long-shot, the actors presented as mere dots on the Patagonian Desert landscapes where the action unfolds.

Lisandro Alonso's JAUJA begins following a deceptively familiar arc, detours into mythic territory, and pushes further still somewhere altogether unknowable.

Its myopic fixation on Josh's problems never goes away, reducing what might have been a multi-layered exploration of long-term relationships into yet another tale of impotent masculine distress.

In what is a bold step in his career, Alonso reaches well beyond neo-neorealism to shape an elusive, dreamlike amalgam of diverse times, levels and encounters. While still employing the steady, dispassionate, contemplative camera-eye of his earlier work, Alonso takes Jauja more in the direction of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films – a type of cinema in which the materiality of landscapes and political histories is melded with the magical, transformative elements of fairytale and myth.

Call it calculated caution, but the beauty of this film comes from its patent refusal to say what it is and what it's about, resulting in a perpetual sense of renewed intrigue and a constant hunger for the fragments of story to neatly interlock. In a world divested of conventional meaning, banal objects such as a toy soldier or a mangy mutt somehow become vital totems of significance even though it's never certain how or why.

[It has] a suggestive, multivalent title that names without quite explaining, and with the story's enigmatic deviations from a purely physical journey, Jauja itself ultimately manifests the urge to escape from a certain narrative—and for Alonso, an attempt to blaze a new path.

This kind of insistent slow cinema is always dangerously near self-parody, but Alonso is exceptional at careful framing that transcends roteness and the cutting is careful to vary the duration of each shot: it's not necessarily axiomatic that someone has to walk or ride across the entirety of a frame before a cut.

It's one of the rare films one can describe as a series of paintings come to life. Shot on 35mm film in 4x3 aspect ratio (the shape of old movies, complete with rounded frame-edges), it allows Alonso to further hone his style of picking a shot and sticking with it as long as he possibly can, while characters move slowly through the frame, or sit still and talk, or think, or be.

Watching Jauja, which is certainly one of the best films of the year, I never once doubted that I was in the hands of a master filmmaker. For all its seeming austerity, the film pulls you along with incredible force — not unlike the way it pulls its lonely protagonist, played by Viggo Mortensen, along on his quixotic, dreamlike journey.

Nothing looks or feels quite like Jauja, Argentine writer-director Lisandro Alonso's sixth feature, and a departure both from his previous work and most contemporary filmmaking. Shot in glorious, color-saturated, 35mm film and framed in the classic academy ratio, Jauja takes a basic Western scenario and follows it to a point that defies elucidation, where what felt archaic proves to be timeless and the horse opera becomes a fairy tale.