If we didn't know Patagonia was subarctic, Liverpool would convince us. Farrel (Juan Fernandez, in real life a snowplow operator) strides through slush in the harbor and makes his way in desultory fashion to the remote snow-covered hillside settlement he comes from, stopping in a strip club, hitching a ride in the back of a lumber truck, punctuating his mundane journey with slugs of vodka from a bottle he keeps in his duffel. Long before he reaches his destination, it's clear he's an isolate by choice. We see no camaraderie in his interactions with the other crew members. His life is as bleak as the barren landscape he left. When he arrives at the settlement, and surreptitiously observes it, it's clear he's at a loss to know what to say or do, and that he left under something of a cloud. He resolves his quandary by finishing the rest of the bottle and passing out in a wooden outhouse amid the shabby living and working places, where sheep-herding and a logging sawmill generate the only employment, and where a rudimentary but adequate cantina is the social center.
As Fernandez obeys his director and remains expressionless, so do the others. There is an overriding stillness, many social and personal vacuums, even after Farrel generates the courage to face his mother and the mentally deficient teenage daughter (Giselle Irrazabal) he left many years ago. As if to underline the impossibility, if not absurdity, of isolation being overcome by emotional bonds, much less speech, Farrel's ancient mother doesn't even recognize him. We're not clear whether his daughter does or doesn't. There's nothing of the feeling or energy of a reunion. A sturdy white-haired local (Farrel's father? uncle? older brother? - the relationship is never made clear) lets us know nobody is glad to see Farrel. "Why are you here?" he grumbles, after dragging Farrel inside after the latter's drunken slumber in the outhouse.
Farrel can't say. He may not know, exactly. It looks like a classic case of male flight to avoid the complications of emotional involvements he couldn't handle, followed by a belated need to square some guilt feelings. Cocooning himself in undemanding, comfortable shipboard isolation has been the price he chose to pay for his freedom. And now thinks maybe he better scuttle back to. The fatalism in his eyes leads us to believe he was aware of the impossibility of rebuilding bridges he burned years ago. Fernandez manages to seem inscrutable and nonplussed as Farrel goes through the motions of a reunion he's completely clueless about how to effect, or even sure it's what he actually wants. Certainly he doesn't persist. After a brief exchange with his daughter, at the end of which he places in her hand an object that finally accounts, so inadequately it seems a desperate lunge on Alonso's part, for the film's title, Farrel leaves, relief being among the welter of feelings with which he's grappling as he trudges energetically away in the snow after saying "I'm off" to his daughter. "Thank goodness Farrel left again," the old local, who takes care of Farrel's mother and daughter, says.
As he gives the theme of isolation visual underpinning by his long takes set against inhospitable environments, there is no question that the potency of Alonso's formalism rests on a feel for landscape (including, however briefly utilized here, seascape) and the willingness to risk long takes on close-ups of physical objects. He's a patient filmmaker, and his films demand patience from viewers. It's as if he seems to believe that explanations or drama would cheapen an existential purity that sits at the heart of his studies of solitariness and the things that create and sustain it. There are times when Liverpool seems about to grind to a halt and be overtaken by entropy. Yet the film gets under your radar and stays with you longer than most.
For more information about Liverpool, visit Kino Lorber. To order Liverpool, go to TCM Shopping.
by Jay Carr
