Interview with Laura Citarella, director of Trenque Lauquen.
by Oliver Spicer.
“I think I’ve become the only witness to a little mystery…”
Laura Paredes in Trenque Lauquen, courtesy of The Corner Shop PR - converted to monochrome.
An anecdote of human obsession -
Split into twelve chapters and chronologically rearranged, the story looks at a missing botanist Laura (Laura Paredes) whose yearning for greater fulfilment in the universe leads her to look for patterns in the static. After discovering hidden love letters in books at the local library, she becomes immersed in their story and is determined to understand the past of their authors. We begin with Laura’s best friend Ezekiel (Ezequiel Pierri) and boyfriend Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd) looking for traces of her presence - but with each new chapter comes a shift in spectator, change in pace, and diversion of narrative trajectory.
With a slightly unstable video-call connecting Buenos Aires to London, I was lucky enough to speak with director Laura Citarella - with our conversation covering inspirations, narrative interests, and the unique production group ‘El Pampero Cine’ of which she is a member of…
OLIVER
I really liked the film when I saw it at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and the way it was presented was the two parts with a short intermission. When did the choice to make the story two parts happen and what do you think the duration of the two parts gave the film?
LAURA
Well, the film started six years ago when we started writing a script. Back then the film was more chronological. But then when you make a film over years, as we did with this one, you start changing your opinion about things. So whilst we were shooting and editing, we realised that it was much better to order the film in another way: starting with the two guys looking for the woman. And so when we restructured the film, it was very organic for it to be ordered in two parts.
The first part is the point of view of the men in a way, and the second one is like the point of view of the woman. A lot of things happen in the film and the story is very complex, so I knew it was going to be a long film. But then I didn't know it was going to have a duration of four hours or divided in two from the start.
OLIVER
You mentioned the perspectives changing. What inspired the many alternate angles and perspective shifts in the film?
LAURA
I like the idea of creating a story where everybody has a different version of the situation, about what happens to Laura. But then the film has Laura's point of view about the facts. So it was interesting to create this effect that while you were watching the film you thought you had a clue, but then in the second part everything suddenly changes. I was interested in working with this kind of surprise.
Everybody in the film thinks they are right. The guys, they think they know why Laura left. But then when you arrive to her voice, you suddenly understand that these guys were wrong and they didn't know anything about Laura.
I wanted to give versions of Laura, the idea that you cannot describe a character in only one way. So I wanted to work this idea of ambiguity, a character that you cannot define or classify. So that's for me, the way I found to work with mystery, the mystery surrounding a person.
OLIVER
You also used many modes of storytelling in the film, and one of them is via letters. I don't know if you've read Dracula or Frankenstein - in Britain every schoolchild is forced to - I was wondering if there are any literary roots behind the film because many reviews have described it like a novel?
LAURA
The film has a very strong relationship with literature because I have a strong relationship with books and so do the groups of people that I work with in El Pampero Cine.
I read Frankenstein when I was working on this film because there's something interesting in that book: a moment where there is a change of point of view and you see the point of view of the monster.
I really liked this idea of depending on who is looking at the facts and the things and the objects, which importance the objects will have on the plot. In the case of this film it is the book of Alexandra Kollontai, which is also a book. What happens with that book is that it's not the same when Rafael looks at it or when Ezequiel looks and Laura speaks about the book. I mean it's like different levels of connection with the plot of the book, and there's something I found interesting in Mary Shelley's novel because suddenly it depends on who is looking at the thing. The monster now starts looking at things like he's a stranger looking at real people from the real world doing things. And his conclusions are like from a kid because he's watching human behaviour for the first time and learns from the people he's watching.
So I really like this idea of changing the gaze, the look, the point of view - and in that procedure you can invent something new with the same facts.
OLIVER
And Frankenstein also has a lot on obsession, it's a very present theme. In the film the obsession is almost like a virus where it catches onto people in the narrative. I was wondering where that force of obsession came about.
LAURA
I think there's a very cinematic way of building stories. This is something that happened in my previous film,
And also what I like in Trenque Lauquen is that she is very obsessed with things she sees. She discovers she loves mysteries but also shares this with the people that surround her so it's kind of like you said, like a virus that gets into people's life where they were asleep and suddenly they start dealing with a lot of mysteries and adventures, and this is a way of being awake in life.
The character of Ezequiel for example. He's a common guy from Trenque Lauquen. He works for the government or something like that. And he has a standard life. He's separated from his ex-wife. Suddenly he finds a story of love in letters that are in books in the library of the town of Trenque Lauquen. So this is something that makes him feel alive. So it was interesting for me to build this idea that Laura is making everybody awake from their own lives.
OLIVER
And what was special about Trenque Lauquen that drew you to that location?
LAURA
Well, Trenque Lauquen is the town where my family comes from. So it's a place I know very well and I wanted to make a film there. I wanted to portray the habits of the people, the rhythm, the language of the people. I wanted to continue working with Laura, like I did in Ostende, my first film as a director. So I wanted to bring the same character to another town. And I thought that Trenque Lauquen was the best place to do it because I have a very personal emotion and relationship with the place.
Usually when I start thinking of a film, I know the locations before the script. I mean, I usually work with the space, with the idea of space, of designing this place where these people live, and then the fiction starts. So that was one of the main ideas for the film, the place.
OLIVER
And a lot of the film is conversations, very realistic conversations. Do you think that's because Laura was also the co-writer and you have worked with her before - or is there another way to achieve that realism?
LAURA
I don't know if they're realistic. I think they are very natural, no? Very human and natural. I think there are many, many reasons. One is that all the names of the characters are the same as the names of the actors. This has to do with the fact that usually I write for those actors. Because I know them, because I've seen them in many films and plays. It's very natural because I write for them, because we work with their nature in a way.
Then in the case of Laura, yes, I think that it was very useful to write together because we wrote together and then read the script out loud. We found a lot of new things about the character of Laura whilst working on the script.
And there's another third reason I think, that we could get this very natural way of speaking. I mean there's no improvisation. The script is written and the text, i'm very strict with the idea of how the text is written - you cannot even change one word. I'm like that on set.
But for example Ezequiel is not an actor, he's my husband. He works in cinema but was not an actor before the film. I wrote the character especially for him and then we worked in a very specific way with him because he's more fragile because he has no tools like an actor but he has another kind of tools that are very interesting because what he can perform is sometimes more natural and spontaneous than an actor because the actors usually try to feel what they are saying and give a lot of energy to the text. He's kind of more light. So I think that all the actors also learn from this new language that he brought to the film. When there's a person that is not an actor on set, the actors also try to connect with this new language or code of this person that is not an actor. And that was something that I also had to learn, how to deal with actors and non-actors and finding a balanced way of directing which was spontaneous enough but also had the tension that the film needs.
So that's why I think we made a film in six years because we've been looking for these things for a lot of time. We were rehearsing a lot, we made some scenes, we made them several times because we were discovering the language of the film.
OLIVER
And I really liked the score of the film: the music choices and mix of music. In some scenes the music would almost follows when a character had a thought. What was the impulses behind your use of music?
LAURA
Well there are many. The music is a mix between the music made by Gabriel Chwojnik, who is the usual musician in my films and in El Pampero Cine films. And it's the music with an orchestra and that music is usually used to make a leitmotif which is the letters, and a leitmotif which is the creature, then the leitmotif... You have different uses, like in a classical way. Like in a Hitcockian way. like Bernard Herrman, this idea of organising the plot temporally. You have the present, the past, the past of the past. So this was the use of this kind of music.
The song Los Caminos, which is the song Ezequiel listens to all the time. I'm also a musician, i'm not working on that now but I used to play a lot. I had like rock bands and ect. With a friend of mine from La Plata, Ramiro Garcia Morete, we played in a lot of bars and things and he made that song, Los Caminos. And I always thought I wanted to use it for a film.
So when I wrote the film, I knew I wanted to use this song and maybe other songs like the Carmen Suna songs, in a way they are used to complete the characters. In this case, Ezequiel is a very reserved and very silent, melancholic guy and his song Los Caminos in a way describes very well what happens to him and that's why he chooses in the film to listen to the song several times.
So this was another kind of usage of music in the film. And then you have the songs that were invented especially for the film, which are the ones you can hear on the radio. And all those songs were edited like very famous hits, like by Elton John or Barbra Streisand. But of course a film like ours could never pay that amount of money to those composers, so we decided to create the music especially for the film.
We are working on the soundtrack, if you follow us on Instagram ect. Soon we will give the information for you to connect to our soundtrack.
OLIVER
And my last question is about El Pampero Cine as it seems like a very unique production company. How did you form and how do you make projects together?
LAURA
We've been together for 20 years, so it's difficult to explain how we gathered together in a short interview. But Mariano Llinás had the main idea of this space of working as a group, and then he joined other people. At that moment, I was a student at the university and Mariano was my teacher. So we became friends and started working together. And finally, when we made Historias Extraordinarias we closed a kind of agreement together where we said, okay, we have to be together. Just like when you are, I don't know, in a couple and decide that finally you are going to live with that person. Well, we decided that.
We are four people Mariano; Agustín Mendilaharzu who is also the DP of Trenque Lauquen and most of our films; Alejo Moguillansky, who is also editor in Trenque Lauquen and also a director; and Mariano Llinás.
So we've been working together for all these years and we've been working as a group. We discuss the films all together. Of course, as directors we have all our own ideas and final decisions over the films - but then we are discussing all the time and we work in a very collaborative and collective way.
Also in terms of economics, we have a lot of protocols on how to deal with money, how to use and work with money on the films. So we have a very, very strong and big structure. We don't have one system of working, every film entails a different way of producing that film.
I'm also a producer, so I'm thinking not only the films by my partners, but also my own films from the point of view of how to produce them.
But we are independent from the usual structures for making films. We are more like a rock band that joins together to make films than a production company.
We received some money from some funding you can find in Argentina, but like free money that you just apply and receive some money that is not much. But we've never worked with the INCA, which is the official institution in Argentina that gives money to make films. We don't with unions, we work between us, between friends.
The interesting thing is that our production company, just to give a name to our group - it is better to say a group. We all are also able to make a lot of things. I mean i'm also a producer, Alejo is also an editor, Agustín is a DP. We can all go out and use a camera ourselves. We are very autonomous, so in some way that makes things easy because you don't need like 20 people to make a film, you can make it with your friends with a few people. This is something difficult to understand for the traditional way of making films. The traditional, like the INCA, the unions - they work in a very vertical and patronal way. And we don't know how to work that way. It's another way of producing. It's not that it's the only one, it's another way of thinking how to produce cinema.
by Oliver Spicer, September 2023.
