As previously mentioned, I often pay attention to lists of the best films of every year when deciding what to watch, plus I put special priority to non-English films. This is because I’ve found that non-English language films tend to surprise me more and it’s boring to watch an endless succession of movies that all conform to the Hollywood mold. Of course, this does mean that I occasionally get a film that is so exotic, so experimental and so niche that I really don’t know what to make of it. Jauja, by Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, is a case in point.

Viggo Mortenson stars as Captain Dinesen, a Dane who is in Argentina for work. Accompanying him is his teenaged daughter Ingeborg. Since there is no exposition and little dialogue, we must infer much from the scant clues that we’re given, such as the fact that this is set in the 19th century from the costumes that they wear. From the dialogue, we learn that there are indigenous natives in the area and that they might be dangerous. They also speak of a former soldier named Zuluaga who has run off and may have joined the natives. One night, Ingeborg runs away from the camp with a young soldier Corto. Dinesan then decides to go out to search for her all by himself with only his horse to accompany him. At first, this seems conventional as Dinesan goes to the working site to question the employees there but as Dinesan ventures deeper and deeper into the wilderness, things get positively surreal and the audience begins to get the impression that none of this is real.

From a production values standpoint, it’s obvious that Alonso is technically skilled. Even in the opening scene in which hardly anything happens, the sight of Ingeborg leaning against her father with the blue of her dress standing out vividly against the grass is oddly mesmerizing. The cinematography is decent and makes good use of the landscape. Unfortunately the production stops from feeling like the low-budget affair that it is. Mortenson’s formidable acting skills can’t save the film from the tedium of repetitive shots of him walking into the scenery or scenes of him doing mundane and uninteresting things like putting on his clothes. It basically feels like actors wearing fancy costumes traipsing about the countryside to shoot a movie. The whole thing feels fake and amateurish, but given the ambiguity of the film’s themes, it’s possible that this impression may well be part of the director’s intentions.

I get that it’s possible to read the film’s themes in multiple ways and there are all kinds of intriguing clues, such as linking the character of Dinesen with the dog. I also note that the changes in the languages being spoken contain information that might be lost to those who rely only on subtitles. For example, a vital clue is how Dinesen communicates with the woman in the cave in Danish while speaking Spanish with the other characters. The final absurdist twist just has me flummoxed and I didn’t get enough meaning out of the film to make the tediousness of the scenes feel worthwhile. It does seem that this director has his share of fans but so far I’m not one of them.