“Trenque Lauquen,” a wondrous multipart epic from the Argentine director Laura Citarella, opens with men on a quest. Laura (Laura Paredes), a visiting botanist working on research in Trenque Lauquen, a town southwest of Buenos Aires, has disappeared, leaving only a cryptic note behind: “Farewell, farewell. I’m leaving, I’m leaving.” Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd), Laura’s boyfriend, and Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri), her research colleague turned almost-lover, drive through the countryside, seeking her traces.
As the film unfolds across twelve chapters (split into two feature-length parts), the men’s pursuit grows like a wild, proliferating vine: Missing women multiply, and the film’s mysteries fork into new ciphers. Yet it’s only in the seventh chapter that someone questions the very premise of the search for Laura, asking Ezequiel, “What makes you think she wants to be found?”
“Trenque Lauquen” undermines the hubris of discovery — a distinctly masculine impulse, and a narrative principle we often take for granted. Produced by El Pampero Cine, an Argentine production company known for sprawling, Borgesian films like the more than 13-hour “La Flor” (2019), Citarella’s film posits that being lost can be a kind of liberation, and that mystery, in movies, can be an end in itself, rather than a path to a revelation. The first, six-chapter part alternates between two timelines and two quests: Rafael and Ezequiel’s search for Laura, and flashbacks to Ezequiel and Laura’s attempts to track down the identity of Carmen Zuna (played in fantasy sequences by Citarella), a schoolteacher who had a passionate affair with a local landowner in the 1960s. Laura finds their erotic love letters hidden away in books at the library and becomes enamored, her passion soon infecting Ezequiel.
The second chapter starts to illuminate the circumstances behind Laura’s disappearance, only to unwrap an entirely new puzzle: this time about two lesbian lovers in the suburbs who seem to be conducting a scientific experiment, secretly raising a mutant creature. Frankenstein comes to mind here and also as a metaphor for the film’s patchwork structure. Relayed through letters and notes in the first half, and Laura’s voice-over in the second, the many micro-stories that make up the narrative seem to take on lives of their own, crisscrossing and diverging unexpectedly. Familiar hints of horror and detective stories appear like red herrings, but the ultimate effect is of a campfire tale: The pleasure lies in the telling — the invention of fictions, the performance of emotions — rather than in the details of plot. Once you lose yourself in the thickets of “Trenque Lauquen,” you won’t want to be found.
Trenque Lauquen
Not rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 4 hours and 22 minutes. In theaters.
