The secret tip of the last film year is Mariano Llinás’ Extraordinary Stories. It’s impossible to do justice to this film in 200 words. That’s not only because the film cannot be compared with anything – and certainly not with what is known as the New Argentine Cinema. As the title indicates, this 245-minute epic, situated on the pampas outside Buenos Aires, is about extraordinary stories. No tranquillity, but the voice-over that pushes the story on. No minimalism, but flamboyant pleasure in film making.
Ideas, anecdotes, characters, references and imagination tumble over each other, but everything is under control, even the satirical lapse. The example for Llinás and the rest is not Bresson, Cassavetes or Antonioni, but rather Louis Feuillade, Borges, or Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
A brief synopsis of the three interwoven stories: X. (played by Llinás himself) is the only chance witness of murder and goes into hiding for fear that the murderers have seen him. Z. takes a job in a small rural town and from boredom starts digging into the increasingly mysterious past of his predecessor. He gets a strange task; he has to sail down the Salado River in a small boat, looking for the monolithic remains of an old, abandoned water project. (GT)
Film details
- Country of production
- Argentina
- Year
- 2008
- Festival edition
- IFFR 2009
- Length
- 245'
- Medium/Format
- Betacam Digi PAL
