2015 in review: jauja and maps to the stars

*SPOILER ALERT*

Jauja: (dir: Lisandro Alonso) The title refers to a mythical paradise, a Shangri-La that nobody's ever seen, and anyone who's ever looked for it has been lost. The film is a hasteless and laggard costume-drama following a Danish engineer (Viggo Mortensen) as he tramps across the Argentine pampas after his runaway daughter and her soldier-lover. He eventually finds her when she is an old lady living alone in a cave with a wounded dog. Then the girl wakes up in modern times in a Danish mansion and you're not sure if she was just dreaming all that, because if it was her dream, why would it follow the father's journey instead of her own? It's an allegory for something, maybe the shaking off of imperial ties and urges, since a recurring symbol is a toy soldier, and it ends with the girl tossing the little guy into the crick for good and all. This is after a vet (or a dog-whisperer, some kind of expert) explains to the girl that her dog's wound has been caused by its own scratching, that the animal is worried because she stays away so long. So maybe the girl is Denmark, the soldiers are indicative of imperial transgressions into Argentina, and the dog is her own true, best nature.

IN SUMMARY: Anyway, the pampas is pretty.

Maps to the Stars: (dir: David Cronenberg) About half is Hollywood in-joke, both crude and cruel, unfunny to anyone who lives outside L.A. (which, note to Bruce Wagner, most of the world does). Where it does succeed, it's because Cronenberg's trademark deadpan, greatly diluted here, keeps the Drama-Queen hysteria from heading up to kabuki levels. It's the supernatural element, the ghosts, a thing Cronenberg takes deadly seriously, which saves the movie from its most likely destiny as shrieking, name-dropping soap-opera. A Paul Eluard poem called "Liberte" is central to the film, and I'm not certain, other than the relevance of the title, as to why. The film's climax doesn't make a lot of sense, but most of the plot doesn't, either, a boiling stew of incest and gerascophobia and nasty, desperation-inspired cruelties, and if it weren't for a great cast and the unflappable sobriety of Cronenberg in the face of surrealism, it wouldn't have been worth the price of admission.

IN SUMMARY: Someone's got issues with The Industry. I'd say read Nathanael West's Day of the Locust
instead.