Directors: Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw (USA, Argentina). Year of Release: 2024
A vast scrubland in North-West Argentina, filmed in black and white. Centre screen, there is a body, apparently of a man who is dead or sleeping. As the man rises, we see that the man is wearing a sort of stetson and that there is a black horse beneath him. He wakes the horse, which does not look ready to go anywhere soon. Slowly, the beast rises, and the man rides it towards the back of the screen. We cut to three gauchos and their dogs, riding across the screen in slow motion to the sound of opera music.
Gaucho Gaucho is more of a series of short stories than a coherent narrative, maybe even a book of poems. The camera sits back and watches a series of gauchos (and the occasional gaucha) doing their thing. We see them eating, talking, praying to Mother Earth for rain. We see them riding horses and herding cows. We see the men playing cards and the women sewing clothes. But some of these sex roles are being challenged by the next generation, of which more later.
We experience Gauchos of all ages, from 5-year old Jony, whose father Solano teaches him gaucho tricks like knife sharpening and rope braiding, through the young brothers Lucas and Pancho who set off on a camping holiday under the stars, all the way up to 83-year old Lelo who has someone comb through his huge white beard. When asked what he would do if he could return to his 25-year old self, Lelo insists that he would do exactly the same as before. Similarly, Jony wants to be a gaucho gaucho – a real gaucho.
We see one girl getting into trouble with her head teacher for breaking her school’s uniform rules. “I’m a gaucha, and this is my clothing,” insists 17-year old Guada, who is wearing trousers, espadrilles, and an oversized beret. Guada is challenging authority both at school and work/play, enthusiastically breaking in horses or taking part in rodeos – traditions which have usually been reserved for men. Guada’s mother worries that this will affect her ability to have children but that’s ok, Guada says, as she doesn’t want kids.
Every so often, you see scenes which remind you of Hollywood cowboy films – horsemen herding a large number of cows across the prairie, or a rodeo. We see Guada again, now on a Heath Robinson type contraption, some sheets of metal welded together to approximate a bull. Four men stand around the beast, each pulling a rope which makes it sways and challenges Guada to stay on board. Guada’s mother continues to look as if her daughter is doing something unnatural, but her father looks on proudly.
Sometimes, there is a sense of temporality, that maybe gaucho culture will soon be a thing of the past – if not because of industrialisation then maybe through climate change. One gaucho, Wally, observes the condors circling ominously above, as his cattle are gradually wiped out by a lack of water and bird attacks. Two older farmers remember how a drought was able to impose serious damage more than two decades earlier. The community is slowly dying out as people are leaving, with no new members replacing them.
Music plays a large part of the film, both live and recorded. We catch different characters singing a variety of songs. We hear ancient and modern music, local and international (including Bizet’s the Pearl Fishers played as the gauchos ride majestically in slow motion). And then there is Santino, who we observe prattling along on his radio programme “Our Roots”. Never one to miss an opportunity to show off, Santino also runs the show at the rodeo and is the town’s paper delivery boy.
There is something soporific about Gaucho Gaucho, a series of images and incidents which you just let flow over you. Most of the audience will not be familiar with gaucho culture (I certainly am not), which gives everything the timeless feel of something which could be happening centuries ago, and could be happening right now. This can be very frustrating if you are in the mood for a different sort of film, but as long as you are not desperate for too many car chases, watching Gaucho Gaucho is a relaxing experience.
Each of the characters’ stories in Gaucho Gaucho is as important – or as irrelevant – as the others. The directors put up their cameras and just let them carry on recording. This means that we do not know the reliability of any of the information we hear. Although the characters are not making things up, in the way that they might for an interview, they are still mainly repeating mythology and traditional stories, whose relationship to the truth might be tangential. This does not make them in any sense uninteresting.
You might also worry about who is telling whose story. For all the talk of leaving the camera going and just filming what you see, the people choosing the camera angles are white men from the Global North. There is still the danger of exoticising a traditional culture (added to this, a bad experience with Oliver Stone’s The Doors makes me slightly allergic to any Western film which includes a shaman). All the talk about Mother Nature and a Heavenly Father walks a fine line between being patronising and sentimental.
But whatever else it is or isn’t, Gaucho Gaucho looks stunning. The constant monochrome cinematography and regular use of slomo could look clichéd, but is carried off with enough panache to remain interesting. And the Argentinian landscape is always photogenic enough to be beautiful throughout. I do feel that Gaucho Gaucho often shows an idealised lifestyle more than the real lives of its characters, and it occasionally sinks into sentimentality, but it takes enough risks to be allowed some slack.
CinePhil 