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

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]