Extraordinary Stories

The last film of the Argentine director, Mariano Llinas, is named "Extraordinary Stories«, And a film never got a better title.

Winner of the BAFICI 2008, the tenth installment of the same, with a duration of 4 hours, with two intermissions of 10 minutes, is divided into three parts, of an hour and a half each. It tells three different stories, which never intersect, but which intersperses them as the tension, emotion and expectation increase.

An impeccable soundtrack, a narrative voice that goes from Daniel Hendler, to Veronica Llinás and Minujín, recounting each and every one of the episodes, mixing with total virtuosity the literary aspect with the visual, to generate the very effect of this discipline, which is the Audiovisual Fact.

Never better achieved the conjunction for the creation of the third sense so famous by that Russian editor who knew how to teach us so much. The film, with the characters of X, Z and H (since they have no other names than the initials), leads us through completely implausible situations, unreal even, but that occur with the naturalness with which life itself occurs. Therefore, nothing is forced, not even the dialogue that might not belong to him.

I must say that, despite a duration that many might qualify as exaggerated, it does nothing more than praise the magnanimous creation of Mariano Llinás (who not only scripts and directs, but also stars in one of the stories).

Not for nothing is what it is. It is currently exhibited at the MALBA, on Sundays at 18:30 p.m. Recommended, highly recommended ...

Movie trailer

And as a bonus, based on my great passion for the film, I leave you what Mariano Llinás wrote about his work. Something that I think naked and you saw a lot ...

"Here, then, are these" Extraordinary Stories. " Here they go; I can add little to his more than four hours of plentiful story. I have written the film, I have directed it, I act in it; commenting on it publicly may be an excess that is difficult to forgive. I will try, then, to mitigate that excess as much as possible.
As is known, the XNUMXth century has witnessed a strange phenomenon: For the first time, the idea of ​​narration has been divorced from the idea of ​​plot. Telling something was no longer necessarily telling a story; The primitive impulse to narrate was definitively freed from being a childish series of vicissitudes and astonishment, and it assumed the entire Universe as a field of action, even in its less memorable corners: distractions, forgetfulness, misunderstandings, empty places, moments in which nothing happens they made their brilliant and proud entry into literature and cinema. The argument (which was previously the condition of possibility of every story) was then seen as a fickleness of other times, as a mere ornamental coquetry. What place then, in this skeptical panorama, does our populous cinematographic novel occupy? What do their wits and plot twists and turns do to this tired old world? What for? Well then: Our purpose, our inordinate purpose has been to experiment with the old forgotten gods of adventure and intrigue and, somehow, bring them back to life. Is it possible, even in our times, to unearth the great fictions without thereby executing a nostalgic or anachronistic action, a sad nineteenth-century masked ball? This question (which I still do not feel capable of answering) has been what has given breath to the film. In the poem that serves as a prologue to “Treasure island”, Stevenson himself wonders if great adventure stories are still possible, if it is still possible for him to be what the unknown Ballantine, Kingoston or Cooper were without being ridiculed. or indifference. Well then, we will say, Is it possible, in these stormy days, to be Stevenson?
Two cares govern, I believe, the course of these stories: The happiness of travel, the happiness of narrating. We have avoided, I believe, the easy temptation to treat both activities as analogous. Anyone who has exercised them knows well that they are very different, and that one thing is the quiet and cerebral elaboration of plots and stories and another is the happy series of discomforts that travel entails, of being carried further and further through the cities. and the roads. Stevenson (Stevenson again) has written "With the lamp lit, by the fire that laughs, in the frayed atlas I continue to travel endless roads." Indeed, the man of letters who, from the tranquility of his desk, dreams of distances and distant lands, and communicates them to many other equally sedentary men, constitutes one of the happiest paradoxes in literature. I can say, with pride not without vanity, that this paradox has not been ours, that those of us who made this film have traveled, that the “endless roads” of the Province of Buenos Aires have insistently known about us, and that we have traveled them from one side to the other happy and passionate, like good sailors. Traveling has not been for us a psychological event but rather a physical one. An English word (those words of which the Castilian has never been capable) defines, I believe, the spirit that has governed the execution of this film: Wanderlust, the lust of wandering, the avidity for movement and drift. That has been our only flag: Show and show us that adventure and risk are still possible territories for cinema. That a film can be made on the routes, and that this infinite labyrinth of routes can constitute it.

When I was a child, my weekends and vacations, my readings of "Arabian Nights," by Doyle and Verne, took place on the outskirts of a country town. While the books spoke to me of London, of those of the seas of China and the deserts of Arabia, reality imposed on me the melancholic and everyday plain. I know that this film was born out of that disagreement today, but I like to think that it is the sweet Buenos Aires landscape that ends up being imposed. That, although wonderful events, mysteries, floods, fires and wild beasts populate it, these exceptions weigh less than each of its desert inns, than its provincial routes, than the music of the town radios, the mills, the dovecotes and casuarinas. It is to this landscape that the film is devoted, and I believe I speak for my colleagues when they say that this is now, and from now on, our landscape. It is to this repeated and hospitable universe whom I now, on behalf of all, pay tribute, greet and thank. Cheers, Universe World! Always on the go!

Mariano Llinas
September 2008 »


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