Extraordinary Stories (2008)

 

Director: Mariano Llinás

Screenplay: Mariano Llinás

Cast: Mariano Llinás as X; Walter Jakob as Z; Agustín Mendilaharzu as H; Raúl Agüero as Vecino en ventana; Alberto Ajaka as Prisionero de las islas; Diego Alarcón as Padre de César; Rodolfo Andreani as Siri; Matías Arce as Vecino en ventana; Lola Arias as Alicia; Enrique Boess as Mazzuchelli; Héctor Bordoni as Carlos Armas; Fernando Brizuela as Sobrino del árabe; Federico Buso as Colombo; Soledad Cagnoni as Contadora; Elisa Carricajo as Hija de Palomeque

An Abstract List Candidate

 

3 Mona Lisas. Careful! No Napoleans.

For this unique Argentinean gem, you follow three completely separate narratives. In the first, a man named "X" (director-screenwriter Mariano Llinás himself) arrives at the boondocks. He stumbles, by accident, into being a witness of a meeting between a tractor driver and two men by hay bales which goes sour, when one shots the tractor driver (all in long take) dead with a shotgun. Well, he was not quite dead as X learns, inspecting the scene and taking a briefcase left behind as he leaves. For the second story, a man named "Z" (Walter Jakob) arrives in a town as the new manager of an agricultural office, only to learn his predecessor Cuevas, who lived in the storeroom, had a secret life buried in the possessions he left behind after his death. And the third story is of a man named "H" (Agustín Mendilaharzu), who has to cross a river searching for manmade monoliths. His is more complicated, as a debate at a society devoted to agricultural ideas ends up in an argument where one man argued that dredging a river could create a transport route; this is dashed by one veteran Bagnasco, who argued against it, leading to another Factorovich, stewing in his seat, to accidentally make a bet it was possible. With the advantage of knowing it was possible and had happened, with a company decades ago having tried this,  and the narrative cutting to an odd promotion film for emphasis, he hires H to look for the remnants.

These three stories by Llinás, over four plus hours long, will never cross but are allowed to breath and get odder, celebrating similar things and finding a wonder in adventure in the least likely of places. Z's one pleasure for his new job will be that he can drive around once a month to inspect their network, but with a system and secrets of a ghost named Cuevas that will draw him in the moment, trying to find his registration for the company car, Cuevas' red notebook is discovered in the care. X hides in the hotel room 301 in fear of pursuers, becoming almost a ghost in himself, and hunting old monoliths, actually markers of the old company construction, H's journey turns when the first he finds has been blown up and sabotaged.

There is too much to document sadly, but Extraordinary Stories, told like a novel with a male narrator a constant prescience to guide us, is idiosyncratic. With elaborate codes in a red notebook, with old pieces of paper between the pages that have aged brown with weird arrow symbols on them. Old letters stored at a grocery store for a "Kurgger", Cuevas under another passport. Or that X's briefcase contains the history of a massacre where, even in prison, a criminal was able to sneak out, to steal another briefcase full of gold from a grain mill business sealing a deal with a Saudi Arabian company, only for it to go south and everyone to die. This is Thomas Pynchon, the author of Gravity's Rainbow (1973), but very subdued, still weaving extravagant events but also embracing the joys of banal life, where H encountering the saboteur, an older grey haired man, is emphases by a sudden spaghetti western theme from composer Gabriel Chwojnik. If it has to be compared to a Pynchon novel, it is The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), which was not as drastic, world expanding or extreme, but a mystery surrounding a centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies. Here, a boss of an agricultural company, Cuevas, becomes a man within a labyrinth of his own design involving wild animals, which is just the kind of narrative Pynchon could have had, but is one of three such stories you get for the price of one.

Seeing Balnearios (2002), Llinás' debut which was an essay hybrid about Argentinean beach resorts, Llinás is also fascinated in the epistolary format, something witnessed here when the narrator of Z's story even takes a tangent into the life of an architect whose work, before his brief flourish of a career faded into obscurity, was considered evil and ominous in the small town he worked in, suddenly turning almost into a documentary. His stories consist of articles, maps, letters, documents etc. all within the narratives, but even the structure changes tone to feel appropriate for what tangent it now is on. That is not to say there is not a compelling trio of narratives here, and even on an emotional level, Llinás hits a tone with complete success, his style subdued to contrast the eclectic nature of the narratives with a diverse music score by Chwojnik that can incorporate a didgeridoo and match the diversions that happen onscreen too.    

Llinás can sustain an entire narrative plot thread being about X pinned in his hotel watching a woman from another room outside his window, or lead to X concocting a theory that the narrator afterwards says is entirely false after spending a long time letting it be drawn onscreen. The chapter devoted to "the Colonel", [Major Spoiler] revealed to be a sick lion and using a real animal with clear care for its well being [Spoiler Ends], turns into a legitimately heartbreaking sequence of pathos about the end of its life. Then there is the tale Lola Gallo, a mystery woman who X tries to connect to the case he is involved with when introduced in a newspaper article he finds. Instead, the film switches to her, with a female narrator and subchapters within a chapter about her, a tale of an old man fixated with her and a young tractor seller she marries that, when it leads to them coming together in a diner, is bittersweet and a standout. It is not even connected at all to X's plot or anyone else's, but is in itself a striking moment which justifies the film's length and structure completely.

The film's length, with two intervals, even manages to include a tangent set within World War II, with a real tank used on the film as it tells of "Big" Ben Ferguson and the Jolly Goodfellows, is a masterpiece which goes against the usual rules of film making and, like a Thomas Pynchon novel, breathes with so much content which never feels indulgent. One which, for a film sadly not as available as it should be, manages to feel like an incredible journey for four hours, telling the story of the pleasures of storytelling and intrigue, absolutely the case here as the journey proves to be more important than the destination for all three narratives¹. It is a film that, in its own distinct way, shows all the possibilities of filmmaking, and it is in the knowledge, possibly not satisfied even after even this gem, Mariano Llinás' next major production La Flor (2018) had to go thirteen hours long to follow from this.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Epistolary/Playful

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

 

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1) [Major Spoilers] H and the man sabotaging the landmarks, named Caesar with an unnatural knack to catch fish and rabbits with his bare hands, are arrested for accidentally trespassing onto a military base illegally, with explosives and weaponry, after deciding to work together. Z ends up on a farm where, after solace, he concludes the journey with Cuevas' secrets even to Africa with little learned. X just leaves the hotel with no resolution, even after killing a man, beyond getting the document in the briefcase to the right people, if by accident, to save a man from prison. [Spoilers End]