La Flor

Started by wilder, April 28, 2020, 02:29:32 AM

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wilder



Directed by Mariano Llinás
Release Date - had several screenings in 2019, currently available VOD through Grasshopper Film

Quote from: Film Society of Lincoln CenterA decade in the making, Mariano Llinás's La Flor is an unrepeatable labor of love and madness that redefines the concept of binge viewing. The director himself shows up at the start to preview the six episodes that await, each starring the same four remarkable actresses: Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes.

Overflowing with nested subplots and whiplash digressions, La Flor shape-shifts from a B-movie to a musical to a spy thriller to a category-defying metafiction—all of them without endings—to a remake of a very well-known French classic and, finally, to an enigmatic period piece that lacks a beginning (granted, all notions of beginnings and endings become fuzzy after 14 hours). An adventure in scale and duration, La Flor is a wildly entertaining exploration of the possibilities of fiction that lands somewhere close to its outer limits.

Quote from: WikipediaLa Flor is broken into six separate episodes, connected only by an on-screen appearance by Llinás explaining the film's structure. The first four episodes have the beginning of a story but finish in medias res. The fifth episode is the only one to proceed from start to end, and the last episode has just the conclusion of a story.

The first episode is shot as a B movie, where a group of researchers encounter a mummy and its supernatural curse. The second episode has two parallel plots. One follows a couple that has broken up as they reunite to record a song together, and the other is a mystery about a secret society formulating a potion for eternal life using a supposedly extinct scorpion. The third episode is about a group of spies, with extended flashbacks describing each of their backstories.

The fourth episode uses an experimental metanarrative in which the four lead actresses play actresses who turn against their director and his elaborate narrative structure. After the director disappears, an investigator develops a theory about the actresses after reading a story about Casanova. The fifth episode is a black-and-white, largely silent remake of Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne. The sixth episode is told through the diary of an Englishwoman living in the Americas during the nineteenth century. She and three other women leave the desert after being held captive many years.



Quote from: Letterboxd user Jake ColeSo that's where Mariano Llinás went. Divided into episodes, La Flor clearly isn't television, though there are moments here and there in the sedate but dissonant tone that the director occasionally strikes that remind me of the sort of drained, alien melodrama of Twin Peaks: The Return. It's fascinating to see this film cohere over its decade-long gestation, with time often marked by the uptick in camera quality as murky, pixel-heavy miniDV becomes hi-def crispness. But Llinás makes the most of each segment, using whatever is at his disposal to fit his wandering inspiration. The first episode, with its shallow depth of field and smeary textures, is perfect for its supernatural horror, and at times it even recalls the early horror of Kiyoshi Kurosawa (you could play Episode I with Pulse in a fun double-feature about the tension of indefinite camera focus). Elsewhere, Episode II, with its preponderence of close-ups, is perfect melodrama even as it dips into some kind of cult suspense.

Episodes III and IV are among the most impressive narrative and structural achievements of the decade, both matryoshka dolls that spiral deeper and deeper and only make things stranger as they go. The 5.5-hour spy thriller that is at its most gripping when thoroughly sidelining the plot in favor of somber tales of unrequited love or the existential despair of spending years crisscrossing the expanse of Russia in search of a mole as life passes outside the windows of trains. Episode IV, with its grand parody of the very concept of muses, both reinforces and shreds any simplistic notion of the overarching film as a tribute to its actresses by giving them a rupture of self-actualization in the face of the director and the whole history of men projecting their vision onto women.

The final two episodes, one a playful remake of an unfinished film, the other a camera obscura haze that ironically finds the actresses asserting their will and liberating themselves from this epic production, may be comparatively muted but are no less powerfully articulated. Indeed, that final segment, with its silent explorations of autonomy as the women drift further and further away from the director's control, culminating in a group hug that doubles as a curtain call, is such a beautiful send-off. That this is followed by 40 minutes of end credits playing over an upside-down shot of the crew breaking down gear and leaving is one final, whimsical touch of this metatextual masterpiece, as beguiling a treatise on storytelling as anything since Rivette.