14/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: We spoke to the rising Argentinian filmmaker about her new four-hour-and-ten-minute work, which follows an amateur sleuth’s investigation into a brace of arcane mysteries

Trenque Lauquen [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laura Citarella
film profile], which premiered to acclaim last week in Venice’s Orizzonti section, seems to be cycling through so many themes and reference points until it finally alights on its key thrust: the urge to disappear, and to cast off the inessential aspects of life that hold us back. Laura Paredes, familiar from recent alternative Argentinian cinema, plays a young researcher and civil servant on the hunt for an elusive species of flower in the rustic town of Trenque Lauquen; eventually, she turns into a figure as chimeric and mysterious to the other characters around her as what it is she seeks. We spoke to director Laura Citarella, also famous for heading up the ambitious production company El Pampero Cine and producing Mariano Llinás’s 15-hour-long La Flor, which premiered at Locarno in 2018.

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Cineuropa: This is part of an ongoing series of films centred on this character, Laura, who shares a name with the actress portraying her, and also you!
Laura Citarella: The first film is called Ostende, named after a small town in the province of Buenos Aires, by the beach. The idea in that movie was to make this character, Laura, always watch and listen to things, and try to find fiction in things. The concept was almost to make the same film, some years later, but in another place, in another town, which is Trenque Lauquen, in the Pampas. My family comes from there. But this time, she would be involved in one of these mysteries: she starts being obsessed, and is absorbed into the story. I don’t know if there’ll be another one in the saga – we should have three.

Initially, two potential influences spring to mind while watching the film: Jacques Rivette and Thomas Pynchon. But as it goes on, it rather evokes classic 19th-century literature – the kinds of novels that author Henry James referred to as “baggy monsters” – and also Borges. Do these references chime with you?
I don’t know about these references exactly, but one specific writer I read a lot during the process was Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean author. I think that maybe there is not just one reference; there is a whole map of books. When I started writing or thinking about this project, I began with the figure of a monster. I started reading Frankenstein again, and there, I found something that I’d forgotten about: the moment in the middle of the book where it changes to the monster’s point of view. So what could possibly happen? That brought me to another film about monsters, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. There’s a giant woman, and I actually used it as a reference for my poster. I started thinking of monsters – woman monsters, specifically. And then I went to Tom Sawyer, as I feel there’s a similar relationship between nature and adventure in the film.

That brought me back to Henry David Thoreau – I read Walden for my other film, Dog Lady. I went back to him and found the text called Walking, which talks about walking with no destination – a flâneur. I brought all of these things in – I wanted everything to come into this film. At the beginning, everyone said, “There are lots of ideas, Laura. You have to take some of them out!”

Could you talk about your inspirations for the film’s feminist aspect? It comes through both in the relationships that Laura has and in her professional interests.
I try not to speak about these things, because then sometimes people start looking at the movie as a “feminist film”. I do like to speak about this, but I also like to cover other aspects. There’s something that we realised finally: the first section of the film is the “men part”, while the second is the “woman part”. The two men are both wrong. Chicha (Ezequiel Pierri) is okay – he’s honest and a very emotional person. Something is happening to him, related to what Laura says about Paolo Bertino, the guy writing the letters [as one of the mysteries deepens towards the end of the film’s first part]. She says, “Carmen Zuna is the most important thing that happened to his life.” And for Chicha, Laura is the most important thing that has happened in his life.

There’s this idea of playing with feminism. But the film always tries to take it somewhere different, rather than it being a didactic thing. I think that if you want to make a feminist film, or a movie that will change the world, you don’t need to speak directly about those things. It’s the same for me with Trenque Lauquen: all of the people in the town said, “But you’re going to tell the story of Trenque Lauquen!” No! In fiction, I’m finding an excuse to be here, and I like the place. If you want to talk about something, you have to tackle it indirectly.