JAUJA – Review

You really can’t fault Viggo Mortensen. When The Return of the King wrapped up the actor’s three-year reign as Aragorn, a leading character in the greatest fantasy epic ever made (and that includes The Hobbit), he could have gone on to be one of the biggest stars in the world. But what did he do instead? David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, and A Dangerous Method. John Hillcoat’s The Road. Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces of January. Add to that a surprisingly modest number of other foreign-language flicks, and to anyone just looking at the paperwork, Mortensen would appear to have fallen off his Kingly horse. But the reality is that he did turn into one of the biggest stars in the world; clearly being in the profession for acting and nothing else, he’s garnered serious credibility to go with it. His latest exploit? The challenging, elliptic, ethereal JAUJA.

To go into plot details on JAUJA would be like screaming into the wind: a waste of time and energy. But let’s give it a shot anyway: it’s sometime in the 19th century. Mortensen plays Gunnar Dinesen, a Danish military type who goes looking for his daughter who has run off into the unknown expanse of the Patagonian desert. Not only is he far from home, but he is far from civilisation, and his odyssey into the barren wastelands take him further from the safety of familiarity and further into the limits of nature.

Argentinian Director Lisandro Alonso certainly knows what he’s doing, and his trick is to not let us know what that is; every step of the way, JAUJA is as beguiling as they come. There are particular scenes which lend you some idea as to what road the movie is taking, dangling a carrot so we keep stepping forward. Once this technique, mingled with an overall glacial pace, mesmerises us just enough, Alonso will throw the carrot away; we find ourselves in the desert, along with a similarly bedraggled and confused Viggo. And the desert is where the magic happens; we’ll experience hallucinations, dreams from the future, visions, or a mixture of all three, as Gunnar searches in vain for his daughter.

One final lurch in narrative toward the movie’s end-point (it would be rude to label it a conclusion) will either strand those whose patience was already being tested, and infuriate those who were merrily drifting along with the film’s curious, already ambiguous storytelling. There is a wealth of beauty in JAUJA, of the mostly cryptic kind; there are also moments which are straightforwardly poetic, like when Gunnar sleeps under a night sky full of stars. And while it will almost immediately leave you scratching your head, it will bury under your skin and won’t leave until you’ve figured out what it all means. Which, in JAUJA‘s case, could be a while.