Balnearios (2002)

 

Director: Mariano Llinás

An Abstract List Candidate

They are places made to be near water.

Starting off with old home movies of Argentineans splashing in the sea, so blue it is unreal and set to jazz, the film immediately tells you what the point of it is, a documentary of the idealised past of balnearios ("beach resorts"), the "country's childhood". This is just a prologue, to a film which from the director of Extraordinary Stories (2008) which soon reveals itself not to be a conventional documentary, but with a gently voiced female narrator, and even black and white footage going further back in time, this sets up various chapters based in various sides of the balnearios, real or fantasised.

A male voiceover set over driving footage introduces us to the section on "Mar Del Sur", an abandoned town and specifically "the arrogant and mysterious mountain" that is the old and unused hotel, an enormous building that just from the windows is a place of ghosts falling to pieces. Like a prelude to Extraordinary Stories, three separate stories in four hours (with tangents) that feels like a cinematic epistolary, this segment follows the tale of its owner "Mr. G", once a young G who became part of defrauding the businessmen who worked with him to run the hotel, accidentally giving G and his wife (a French singer) ownership. This blurs the line between what is real or pure fabrication from old footage and imagination. One which escalates to a lawyer getting ownership of the hotel and letting crime take over, leading to a baker being murdered for trying to uncover this and a painter from Uruguay committing the murder as a partner.

The Beach Episode is not as dynamic, but as an essay film in itself, set to recorded footage, it struck a cord for me as we see the life of the Argentinean beach. At first their environments are dead cities when out of season, seeing shots of the town as fading entities until life returns, with the odd realisation, yes, in the Southern hemisphere when the patrons come, December is a warm period, and not cold and wet. Talking of the millions, even priests, rolled off in stats, there is so much I can write from the narration and I have barely recorded most of it in this review for description. That parasols have a masculine attitude to them due to men obsessing where to position them, or the long and vain walks which cause perpetual traffic. We see footage of young boys moulding a racetrack for toy cars in the sand, even getting down to the ground with an improvised tool to smooth and level it, whilst the mysterious and foreign scenario these beaches are for dogs is shown in the shots of our canine friends.

Starting with the moral criteria of flags warning where the tides are dangerous or not, this was where Balnearios kindled a love for English beaches as an Englishman, where there are surprisingly not that many differences culturally between them then you would think, a place equally of the sea for all people even if fraught with jellyfish and the wind blowing objects away, as witnessed with a red and white striped parasol being blown along the beach. All of this involves footage of regular people in a seaside town, such as the night-time scenes of the amusements and cotton candy machines. The narrator is whimsical, openly playful, and sometimes mean in its anthropologic tone where here he talks of singers of yesteryear and second rate television actors being the night-time entertainment. In the segment about arcades for video games, now a rare entity sadly, the words are actually affectionate and respectful even if intentionally making it absurd and sounding like an anthropology documentary David Attenborough could narrate, the jungle of scoreboards where the champions take domination over cabinets for hours, destroying "laughable enemies" with elegant playing, hunting opponents and challenges whilst in this digital ecosystem the onlookers watch over their shoulders like an alternative species of animal.

This entire segment by itself would have been a great gem by director Mariano Llinás itself, as much as between the "thousands of sand buckets and shovels", because everything at a seaside has to be sold in the thousands, or the shots of a gift shop full of shell art and a corkscrew with the screw positioned in the crudest area on a nude figure, there is not that much difference between Argentinean and Britain in their seaside, itself an entity of its own nature between both continents with its own culture and symbolism. The only thing that stands out is the churrero seller who carries wafers in a metal cylinder on his back on the beach, which I have never seen in a place like Skegness, or that the English usually built cafes or stands to sell hot dogs from.

The story of Miramar adds a real piece of weird real storytelling, an anecdote of a peaceful and calm town where the original happens to be submerged under water, cutting immediately to a lamppost sticking out of the sea. With images above and below the waters you could image Werner Herzog voicing this segment, as we learn of the likes of Hotel Venecia being under the water along two others, images of posts and slides and houses in shots barely above the surface visibly real images from a freak incident, whilst the underwater imagery, in orange lit ocean darkness, turn an undersea petrol station into a surreal abstract image. That the narrator cannot give the reason why this actually happened - a storm or a nearby dam development two theories - adds to the mystery, the point instead the surrealism of regular life witnessed, emphasising in it what Llinás would explore in a fictionalised context with Extraordinary Stories.

The last part of Balnearios, closing it out, is its own distinct piece, in mind Llinás would continue with documentary and short film work in his career. Heading to the provinces, we meet Zucco, setting up the location first win an old fifties documentary about the promise of dams and irrigation channels which would be evoked later in Extraordinary Stories, where one of its stories is set up with a similar looking public information film. Set now in the world of resorts of concrete and swimming pools, of civil engineering and hydropower than natural tides, Zucco is a regular older man on the street and our central lynchpin here, an artist whose work varies between painting and metal art of marine gods, Lord Neptune and fish beings, a segment which in itself does also emphasis Llinás as an admirer of ordinary people, as interested in shots of Zucco cooking shown in detail as he is the process of the metal craft in his workshop.

Note by here, I have come to adore the work of Llinás in both style and his writing, whose work has sadly not been easy to see, a shame as with the things I have seen, he is distinct. Especially as with La Flor (2016) being thirteen plus hours long, his interest in sprawling epistolary films, managing it here in just eighty minutes, led him to push against traditional rules of film length, which will present an issue in distributing these productions. All the segments in Balnearios interconnect in a beautiful and fun ode to a piece of Argentinean culture that could be ignored. Befitting it ends with a man whose "disturbing worship of water" intertwines with a love of alcohol, drinking where the music is live and from the soul. By this point he even shatters the documentary tag fully by having a snapshot of one of Zucco's dreams, about a Hell where everyone is however cheerful, a Hell of pods to swim in and stone manmade waterfalls, even a mermaid presiding over everything. These distinct images, even in the final shot in black-and-white of a young woman swimming by herself in the sea, could be easily ignored within the constantly quotable narration, but cements the virtues of the film.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Epistolary/Playful

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