Inside Laura Citarella’s Vision for Miu Miu Women’s Tales

In Argentinian director Laura Citarella’s 2022 film Trenque Lauquen, named for the small town in which it is set, a local woman seeks liberation by vanishing into the wilderness. When Citarella was approached to direct the newest film for Miu Miu Women’s Tales, an ongoing series of shorts directed by women, she was interested in exploring the same thread through a marriage of worlds. “The fashion world is something very distant or very different from day-to-day life in Trenque Lauquen,” she says. “I wanted to try the same themes of Trenque Lauquen, but with this new world arriving – the Miu Miu world.”

El Affaire Miu Miu (The Miu Miu Affair), the 28th Miu Miu Women’s Tale, which premiered at Venice Film Festival, opens with the arrival of a fashion shoot in Trenque Lauquen. The town is both curious and suspicious at first, but when the lead model suddenly disappears, three local women – a detective, police officer and medium – team up to track her down. As they discover Miu Miu pieces trailed through the Argentinean Pampas (grasslands), each character notices surprising shifts in their own relationship with fashion. 

Following Miu Miu Women’s Tales from the likes of Agnès Varda, Janicza Bravo and Alice Rohrwacher, Citarella’s new short is a strangely comedic detective story exploring the beauty of unanswered mysteries and the dialogue between clothes and identity. Following its premiere, Mastermind met Citarella at Venice’s Baglioni Hotel Luna to discuss why she wanted to make a fashion film through a “fantastical” lens, and the enduring appeal of the Brontë sisters.

Throughout ​​El Affaire Miu Miu, the local characters start subtly wearing the pieces they discover during the search for the missing model. Why did you want to use clothes as part of the journey of this film?

LC I really wanted to think about how to use the Miu Miu collection in another way. I always make fiction, and I thought, how can I put all these things as elements of fiction here? How can I use the costumes, not in a cosmetic way? One of the clues for me was to use every item of clothing as main characters. Something we invented while we were making the film is “Miu Miu-ification.” That was funny for me, because it was bringing the clothes not only to a police plot, but also to a fantastical idea of how to use the clothes. 

There’s a moment where the lead male character, Chicho, tells the detective he feels personally responsible for the model disappearing, and she replies, “I promise no one’s thinking about you.” It felt like a hilarious, wry comment on men who struggle to see beyond themselves. What did that line mean for you? 

LC I think there’s an anxiety of men trying to understand things very quickly, and thinking everything has an explanation. And if they don’t find it quickly, they put themselves in the centre. The women in this short allow time to think and discover and understand, and are open to the idea of mystery. In this regard, I think women are more open to that possibility of not understanding. But the film is not judging Chicho for this, it’s more like there’s tenderness there. Like, poor guy, he grew up this way. 

I wonder if it’s because men are generally raised to feel entitled to the world, but then if the world is hard to understand, that can make you feel very lost. 

LC Yes, I don’t know why it happens, but I see it in many things. I’m part of a group of filmmakers called El Pampero Cine, and my partners are three men, and not all of them, but sometimes I see they have to perform this idea of needing to give names to things. I think women don’t need that. Or also the property of ideas: when I work with women, I agree on exchanging ideas, and I don’t care whose idea belongs to who. We exchange, [and] the important thing is the result of our discussion. Men, I think that they need to be the owners of the idea. They need to give a name to it, to be the creator; they have to perform much more. 

And it’s the things that are not known and mysterious that are more cinematically exciting…

LC This is something I discovered in cinema – that it has this kind of hypnosis. I usually use an example by Gilles Deleuze, in a book called Dialogues, with Claire Parnet. He speaks against psychoanalysis. He says the problem with it is that it kills the fantasy. When you dream of a horse, the next day, somebody tells you the horse is your father. In a way, the mystery of that horse, that was a mysterious image, is lost. 

I think there’s a problem with that in cinema during the last few years, because audiences are getting used to being given names of things and explanations. You can see that in TV series, which I don’t watch, but usually they start and then there’s a flashback explaining why the character did this or that. People are starting to be comfortable with that kind of situation, [and] I think that’s very patriarchal. It’s a very male vision of the world, the idea of tranquilidad, the quietness of having everything closed and explained. In Trenque Lauquen, I really wanted to make a film where the mysteries were fading into each other, more than finding results or answers.

Because that’s more like life, right?

LC At least, life is more beautiful that way. You can see that in literature. The experience of reading novels, you feel much more ambiguity, because not only is information given, but you have to form the images in your mind. 

The Miu Miu Affair is framed with a wide lens in both outdoor and domestic scenes. Why was that important for you? 

LC It has to do with the landscape. In the final part of Trenque Lauquen, [which depicts] a woman missing in the middle of the Pampas, we found [a wide shot] was the best way to portray this. So when I decided to make this short and to have again a character that was lost in the Pampas, I thought maybe it was good to start from that format. I also felt that this film was very close to the classics about detectives, about espionage. So in a way, it was a bit of a dialogue with the history of cinema. 

I also didn’t want to have a main character in the film. There are secondary characters, but I wanted the three women to be at the same level. I really wanted to make a democratic relationship between [the three main characters], and that’s why they all have their roles – the police woman, the medium, the detective. Having this framing was easier for me to shoot them together.

The interplay between the three women is very comedic. Is that something that’s developed on set between the actresses, or is it in your script?

LC It’s completely written. I’m very, very, very strict with the text. I’m a nightmare. The thing is, I know all these people very well, because I’ve worked with them not only in Trenque Lauquen, but in previous films with Laura Paredes, Veronica [Llinás] and Juliana [Muras]. So I also know how it works, the humour that they have. Also there’s something very local from Trenque Lauquen, the town – not only the humour of what they say, but the time they take to say that. There’s a rhythm in this town that becomes like a language. It’s the connection between writing the right jokes for them, and then they also bring their own dramaturgy, their own way. They invent or reinvent the text on the set, so it’s something in the middle. 

Lastly, who is your mastermind?

LC I used to have a period where I was devoted to writers. I work very much with literature when I write my scripts, more than with films. There was a moment where I was a big fan of all the writers from Massachusetts at the end of the 19th century – [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, [Henry David] Thoreau. I went to [Massachusetts] and I stayed there for two weeks, just trying to understand the atmosphere. Then I had this moment with Virginia Woolf. And lastly, my masterminds, who stay more time than expected, are the Brontë sisters. I’m completely obsessed with them. Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, of course, are the most famous, but then if you also understand the letters they wrote… I feel that I am discovering an entire world there. I will use this family for my next film. I will make a film about women writers, and maybe that’s why I’m so crazy about them.