‘Eureka’ Review: Lisandro Alonso's Dreamy, Chimeric Survey of Indigeneity in the Americas

Courtesy of Film Movement

For thousands of years, cultures across the world have treated birds as symbols of liberty, transition, and new opportunity. From their positioning in the skies high above, birds experience an understanding of space and time distinct from our own, far removed from the limitations of temporal concerns that keep humanity tied to their manmade troubles. Through his latest film, Eureka, Argentinian auteur Lisandro Alonso bridges a metaphorical relationship between the primordial freedom of our feathered friends and the plight of Indigenous communities across the Americas, presented through a singular vision that abandons traditional narrative cinema to take a path towards something more poetic, more experiential. Although challenging through its prolongated sequences, elliptical framing, and opaque themes, Eureka offers a deeply mesmerizing glance into Indigeneity in a post-colonial world. 

Eureka is presented as a triptych, traveling to different locations and through epochs of time to examine the dynamics of Indigenous communities and their American surroundings. The movie's first installment takes us to a dusty frontier town circa 1870, where an archetypal gunslinger named Murphy (Viggo Mortensen, a frequent collaborator of Alonso) is on the search for his lost daughter. Shot in black and white and harshly lit, this introduction communicates with the artifice presented in many seminal Westerns, a genre with conventions that, of course, misrepresented Native American perspectives in favor of whitewashing history and making heroes out of villains. This preliminary passage shines a light on the violence and debauchery of Western expansion left out of the history books, setting the scene for the America in which Indigeneity was disenfranchised, debased, and nearly obliterated.

In a radical and compelling shift of framework, Eureka swiftly leaves behind its opening period setting and transports audiences to modern-day Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Here, Alonso's approach ventures into documentary territory, focusing on actual figures from the Oglala Lakota Indian reservation to comment on the community's marginalized existence in contemporary America. Alaina Clifford leads this centerpiece, with the film following her activity as a policewoman working an understaffed night shift on the reservation. An actual Pine Ridge police officer, Clifford's unassuming performance speaks to the genuine anguish she must experience as she serves her community, one shaped by the poverty, addiction, and suffering forced upon it by the white world outside of the reservation's boundaries. Pointing to Pine Ridge's infrastructural concerns, Clifford, or "Officer 174," repeatedly calls for backup but is just given more assignments to tackle on her own as the night progresses, a notable lack of support in a society where 60,000 citizens are the charge of roughly twenty officers. Running parallel to Clifford's storyline is Sadie (Sadie Lapointe), a young basketball coach at a Pine Ridge school whose bright outlook is finally contaminated beyond repair by the unremitting pain of her people. In a last-ditch effort to preserve her essence, Sadie pays a visit to her grandfather, a spiritual leader on the reservation, who offers her the option of escaping, of seeing the world in an entirely different way. Sadie says goodbye to her life, drinks a beverage concocted by her grandfather, and is transformed into a large and elegant stork-like bird with the mythical powers of traversing time and space to explore the worlds of other Indigenous societies.

In its last installment, the film travels to the dense jungles of the Amazon in 1970s Brazil, where the bird spirit observes a small congregation of Indigenous peoples. More abstract than the preceding parts, the sensorial elements of this final act are embedded within its lush setting, the sounds of nature that envelop each scene. The community in focus shares their dreams each day, living in harmony with the surroundings and one another until the ever-expanding vines of consumerism eventually make their way into their hidden utopia. A violent betrayal leads one member of the company (Adanillo Costa) to flee for a nearby camp set up for gold prospectors, where he quickly comprehends the mechanisms of control and exploitation that define Capitalist ventures in the "civilized" world. In a peculiar but beautiful final sequence, the young man is faced with his ultimate and inescapable fate.

Courtesy of Film Movement

Through Alonso's considered crafting, Eureka culminates in a demanding work that oppugns virtually all forms of orthodox filmmaking. While the film employs Mortensen and French actress Chiara Mastroianni––who is featured in the first two sections–– these notable stars are pushed to the periphery, allowing the Indigenous non-actors to hold the movie's focal points. By casting non-professionals in roles that mirror their real lives, Eureka brings forth an authenticity in the moods it captures, bolstering its overall vision and allowing it to function without an intricately planned screenplay that relies on dialogue or traditional arrangements of storytelling. In collaboration with Fabián Casas and Martin Camaño, an Argentine poet and writer, respectively, Alonso constructs a story that is much more intrigued by moods and experiences rather than inciting incidents or interpersonal conflict. This intellectual approach feels more attuned to grasping the deep complexities met by America's Indigenous populations since their first contact with the European colonizers that would come to shape much of their future.

Shot by Timo Salminen, well-known for his work on Aki Kaurismäki's movies, the visual language of Eureka aligns itself with the film's contrasting segments, constantly shifting. A stylized guile of the Western genre in the first section, the film evolves into a digital cinéma vérité look and feel in its central part, finally shifting to a more bucolic approach at the conclusion, brimming with languid fades in and out of the dense tropical forests of Mexico where shooting took place. These disparate approaches are linked via extended long takes employed throughout, showcasing the director's preferred fascination with observing his performers as they interact with their entire surroundings. 

Despite Eureka's rejection of familiar forms of storytelling that would open its vision up to a broader audience, Alonso's sprawlingly abstract concept is one that movie-goers who head to the theater to challenge their ideas will appreciate. The director voyages through the limits of space and time to probe the Western forces that have (and continue to) disenfranchise Indigenous communities not only in the Americas but across the globe. While its 147-minute runtime and heavy use of extended sequences prove demanding to even the most enthusiastic lovers of art cinema, Eureka is ultimately a rewarding cinematic experience that forefronts essential subject matter in an incredibly reinvigorated manner.

4/5

‘Eureka’ world premiered as part of the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. Film Movement will distribute the movie in the United States, with its theatrical release beginning on Friday, September 20. Click here to find showtimes of 'Eureka' near you, and watch the trailer below: