For his twisty, trippy mystery thriller The Vanished Elephant (El elefante desaparecido), set in Lima, Peru, filmmaker and Film Independent Fellow (Screenwriting Lab 2011) and Board Member Javier Fuentes-León identified the two films that inspired him the most as iconic LA-set classics Chinatown and Mulholland Drive. “I actually wrote the project thinking of LA,” he told LA Film Fest Director Stephanie Allain at the Q&A after the film’s screening at the Festival last night. “The first draft was in English, and it was called Forgotten Highway.”

But having made his first film, Undertow, in Peru—where he had such great experiences—Fuentes-León decided he wanted to go there again for this project. Luckily, however, he brought the movie back to LA, the place of its inception, to screen in the Festival’s Buzz section. (It premiered at Toronto last fall.) Equal parts film noir and mind-bending, surrealist meta-fiction, The Vanished Elephant follows crime novelist Edo Celeste, who is still mourning the loss of this fiancée Celia, who disappeared seven years ago on the day of the 2007 Peru earthquake. Writing what he insists will be his final book about his fictional detective Felipe Aranda, Edo meets a man who he believes to be Aranda himself, and who he is certain holds the answer to what happened to Celia all those years ago.

Fortunately for those in attendance but unfortunately for those reading right now, much of the Q&A consisted of Fuentes-León explaining the film’s many twists to a confounded, dazzled audience. (Don’t worry: we won’t spoil anything here, but we will recommend you see the movie when it hits theaters later this year.) About the film’s careful visual approach, Fuentes-León told Allain that “we wanted to give the hint of a puzzle, that you’re watching a movie that is a collage, is a chess game. Every time we could, we either found a floor that looked like a [chessboard] or we added it.”

The film’s dizzying exploration of the role of a creator and his character is carefully laid out in the art direction as well: “If you go back and you see the film, there are many things that are planted that predict what’s going to happen later,” he said, enumerating some small details that the unsuspecting viewer might never catch as hints. The editing and sound design, too, were carefully worked out to contribute to the film’s central puzzle.

The film’s relocation, too, was an important puzzle piece that clicked into place perfectly. “When I went location scouting for my first film, I took a photo [of a rock formation resembling an elephant]. Then, six months later, the earthquake happened” and destroyed the elephant rock (or, more to the point, made it vanish). “So actually, by moving it to Peru, the story got better.” That may be so, but this twisty mystery is still very much in the spirit of LA noir, and it fit right in at the LA Film Fest.

Mary Sollosi / Film Independent Blogger