Jauja

This movie is beautiful at times. In addition to being in 4:3 format, the colors are made to look like it was shot in the early decades of color movies. This goes excellent together with the "western"-setting. Both the scenery and the costumes worn by the actors, attract your attention, and rewards you for it. The 4:3 format makes me think of cheap western shows made for TV, filmed in studios with backdrops. This move is almost demonstratively not using backdrops, and it has actors moving back and forwards in the scenery, giving the movie a sense of depth (almost despite the aspect ratio).

So, it's good looking. Sadly, the story is not as interesting as the setting. In parts of the movie the story moves painfully slow. There are interesting portions of it, and the story does get going after a while. But in the end of the movie it takes a quick turn to the surreal, which could have been interesting, if it hadn't been ruined straight away by an underwhelming ending. I'm sure there is something to explore with the story, why it ends as it does. The obvious answer is hopefully not the correct one.

On a different note, I liked the acting and the actors in this movie. I understand Danish, and I thought it was great fun to see how it was used along the Spanish. The best scene is maybe the one where French is also spoken.

There's hardly any music in the movie at all, but the little there is is nice. I also liked the sound in this movie, at one point it made me squeam more than I have in a long time.

Gorgeous cinematography with bright green and blue tones in an unconventional aspect ratio, set in Argentine Patagonia, and having almost no music score (emphasizing natural noises, instead). All those traits make this Danish-Argentine-French-Mexican-German production to be unusual among Westerns. As a matter of fact, its script is even more deviant. While general plot - a mounted armed man searching his daughter in the wild - may be compared to John Ford's The Searchers, the pictoric or symbolic element puts it closer to films such as Jodorovsky's El Topo or Jarmusch's Dead Man, although having no comic relief and being more violent. The script makes no sense in linear narrative terms, and it is open to multiple interpretations as you may notice if you read a wide number of reviews. A Danish family in an Argentine military action in Patagonia directed to killing native people; a supposedly deserter with rumored bizarre habits; an officer who speaks French and thinks about the ball planned by his superiors; a harsh officer who hates Indians, has strong sexual appetite and wants the Danish girl; that teenager evades with a young soldier with no pevious sign that she intended something like that. Nothing fit very well and dialogues lead nowhere. It becomes more obvious when even more surrealistic situations eventualy happen. Indeed, nothing may be taken literally, but there is also no recipe for connnecting the pieces either. What does Viggo Mortensen's character deeply searches? What the desert in the end of the world means for him? What does his daughter represents? What her two latter appearances mean? What those officers and the native Americans symbolize? Many open questions to think about.

I'm all for complex dramas even if they're extremely slow paced. However, when it comes to nearly indecipherable plot elements and extremely slow pacing, I'd rather watch paint dry.

This is one of those movies that maybe a select few cinephiles and critics will tell us is poetry in motion. I guess if you're one of the unsophisticated like myself, you very well may not have the slightest clue what is taking place on screen. I know I didn't.

The fine actor Viggo Mortensen's talents are nearly completely wasted here in this totally confusing mess of a movie. I'm glad some have found it to their liking, but to me it was totally incoherent, as I kept waiting for some of it to make sense. Good luck with that!

After really loving the first Alonso film I saw, 'Los Muertos', I've struggled somewhat with his films I've seen since. For some reason Alonso's dedication to vaguely mythic and very enigmatic storytelling worked great for me in 'Los Muertos' -- creating a deeply disturbing portrait of a man who is leaving prison and returning to his family, perhaps to kill them (or perhaps not).

Jauja is also the familial story of a man on a mythic journey, in this case a Danish Captain in the army, stationed in an unspecific south or central American country that is in the midst of being colonized by the Spanish, with the Danish presence seeming to be one of both rivalry and co- operation. Viggo Mortensen (always excellent) plays the Captain, who has brought his daughter with him (why he would bring her to such a hostile, dangerous and male dominated environment is never made clear). When she runs off with a young soldier, Mortensen's character heads out to find her, and ends up traveling into his own soul, with the lines blurring between real and imagined, reality and surrealism.

The film looks great, and has a lot of striking and memorable moments. But after two viewings, I wasn't sure quite what it was saying, and – worse – I'm not entirely convinced it does either. That said, there are enough things I admire; the odd photography, the many strange and discomforting images and incidents that stick in my head like memories of a bad dream, that I'm willing to forgive it's frustrations. To a point.

This reminds me a lot of Gerry. This is a deep and very experimental film, not really a film that would be easy to recommend to casual audiences at all. It was surprising to see viggo mortensen in a role like this, and he does well, sort of. It's hard to really grasp how to judge him and the film around him. What I will say is that, just on that aspect, the film just wasn't very intriguing and that's really the one failing that makes or breaks a film. I was bored, and I rarely like to use that as a criticism but it is in this case. I definitely don't recommend it, even if I feel like there are some nice scenes here and there and some great cinematography. It's a film I don't like but I don't hate because it's still something different.