She in the Mist feminism, Bolaño and the vanishing impulse

For the past few days, I've been wondering if I can think of Trenk Rocken as a womb in which everything slowly waits to mature.

The idea came about after watching the movie "She in the Mist" late last year. In December 2022, "She in the Mist" won the Golden Coconut Award at the 4th Hainan Film Festival. Unlike the first "I Am Not the God of Medicine" and the second "Balloon" (the third edition was not selected), it is an Argentine independent film, four and a half hours long, divided into two major 11 chapters, nested, intertextual and looping to tell the story of disappearance and search, complex and fascinating.

The story takes place in the small Argentine town of Trenque Lawken, in the southern part of the Pampas, with strange buildings like flying saucers, all roads are boulevards, shrouded in the magical reality of the explosion of Latin American literature. That was the hometown of director Laura Chitarella, who gave the film the Spanish title "Trenque Lauquen." She used the smartest method - no one in the film talks about small cities, but every sentence is building small cities, a slightly remote and unfamiliar under the geopolitical and global order, but giving birth to new power.

The more explicit protagonist in the film is "she" in the fog. The camera sweeps over bleak rivers, fields, closed-door shops, and two men driving a rattling car looking for "her." "She", also known as Laura (coincidentally, the heroine has the same name as the director and actress), a quasi-biologist working in the city government and a resident guest on the radio show "Sea of News", bringing listeners her column "Women Who Made History". She disappeared. The men in the car are Raphael, her boyfriend who is about to live with her, and Chicho, a local between her work partner and secret lover.

This is a Bolaño-esque proposition: loss and search, like the search for poets and literary truths in "The Wilderness Detective" or "2666", and "She in the Mist" is about how women find themselves.

In order to prepare for the radio program, Laura often had to go to the library to find information, but there were few books of female scientists in the poor library of the small town, and finally the administrator simply found all the women's autobiographies and gave them to her. She was attracted to one of the books, The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Woman, the autobiography of Russian communist revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai.

Born into an ancient aristocratic family, Kollontai studied in the turbulent environment of World War and regime change, witnessed popular uprisings, went into exile and returned to Russia, becoming the first female official member of the cabinet of the government in history and the world's first female ambassador abroad. In 1971, 19 years after her death, the English version of The Autobiography of Sexually Liberated Women was published. This is obviously a book that the director deliberately placed. In the early 20th century, Kollontai advocated women's liberation and proposed the glass-of-water doctrine, arguing that love does not exist, and that sexual needs between men and women are like drinking water to quench thirst. But glass-and-glass doctrine was later discouraged as anti-social, and Kollontai's novels became banned. In the final autobiography, it was found that a large number of statements were deleted, rejected and deleted even when footnotes were inserted, such as "It is not her particular feminine virtues that give her honorary status in human society, but the value of her useful mission accomplished, her personality value as a person, as a citizen, as a thinker, as a fighter".

On his deathbed, Kollontai insisted on changing the first-person singular "I" in his autobiography to the first-person plural "we". So the book became a code word for women in more time and space.

In Her in the Mist, it's also another code, a code word between a Trenque woman and an Italian man. During the reading, Laura found and stripped a secret love letter between the sticky pages, warm and explicit, addressed to Carmen Zuna and to Paul Bettino. She shares the discovery with her work partner, Chicho, who is caught up in a purposeless puzzle-solving frenzy. Laura finds more books and letters from the library, and Chicho uses the town's network to deduce and confirm Carmen Zuna's identity. At the end of the communication, Carmen disappeared. The revolutionary, the narrator and the narrated develop strong intertextuality.

At the same time, titles such as "Journey of Exploration", "On the Road" and "Raphael's Journey" continue to remind viewers that this will be a journey without an end, they will continue to look back on the past on the road, but they will never be able to solve the mystery of the present - where did Laura go? Why did she disappear?

Her boyfriend, Raphael, a chattering scholar who is older and more experienced than her, does not know her well and attributes Laura's disappearance to timidity, avoidance, or immature self-esteem (perhaps a reflection of Raphael's heart). Raphael held on to the conviction: "She's crazy." ”

Chicho is apparently closer to Laura's life before she disappeared, picking up Laura, listening to "women who made history," and even discussing one of the episodes with Laura about Madame Godeva. Legend has it that Lady Godeva rode naked through the city of Coventry to secure tax relief for the citizens. Chicho insisted that this was a secret interest between their husband and wife. A collision between male and female perspectives, in fact, Chicho is not so close to Laura.

Chicho finally lifted the fog in the studio of "Sea of News". Laura left a long monologue recording that told another story line of her experience in a small town. Lost in Carmen Zuna and Paolo Betino's correspondence, Laura finds herself overlooking a sensational news story in the town during that time: the Lake Incident. At the home of Esperanza, a medical doctor who participated in the investigation, Laura saw her life: living with a same-sex partner, living in seclusion, raising unknown objects that appeared in the lake. The coin flips the other side – after living with Esperanza and her partner for a while, Laura realizes that she likes to be with them. Laura begins to face her feelings and become them, no longer feeling lost, not afraid to become a beast or a mad woman.

Laura's boss later relayed to Raphael that Laura had always done a good job, but in the end she was always absent-minded, sloppy, rude, as if she had changed a person.

Then they disappear and refuse to be sought, refuse to be "secondary" to girlfriends, wives, mothers, etc., refuse men to "impose their ego on women" and "expose themselves to the crisis of losing their independent existence" (Kollontai, Autobiography of Sexually Emancipating Women).

Carmen Zuna's secret correspondence, Kollontai's Autobiography of a Sexually Liberated Woman, discussions around Madame Godeva, and the isolated medical doctor Esperanza and her female partner, Trenk Lauken conceived many women's lusts, thoughts, sacrifices, and mysteries. They are the labyrinth of the world, the ghosts, the monsters, the huge faces on the poster that hang over the silhouette of the town, leaving a glimpse of mystery.

Carmen and Laura decided to disappear and hiked across the prairie, as Thoreau wrote in The Walk, "We have never walked in this real world, which perfectly symbolizes the path we love to take in the inner world and the ideal world; And sometimes, undoubtedly, we find it difficult to choose our direction because it is not yet clearly present in our minds. "They are not only lonely, but also a little confused, maybe in their own fog (writing at this point, suddenly lamenting the beauty of the translation of the title), but at the same time decided not to go back. And their lover, after trying to find it for many days without success, finally realized, "You are nowhere to be found, you are everywhere." ”

The four-and-a-half-hour film ends gracefully and stretched in Emile Waldrefer's "Waltz on Skating".