Then there’s the question of the film’s generally ugly video aesthetics, but this too deserves closer attention. At the same time, Llinás deploys keen filmmaking instincts throughout, not least of all in the myriad ways that the voice over fails fails to synch up precisely with the onscreen images, either via temporal disjunct (describing things that haven’t happened yet against images in the present narrative tense) or through the subtle mis-description of events. I’d go so far as to suggest that the “anti-cinematic” aspects of Historias extraordinarias are part of its very subject, a tacit acknowledgment of film’s medium-specific strictures as a storytelling device. Some have carped that this narration gives Historias extraordinarias the feeling of being a book-on-tape rather than a properly cinematic experience, but Llinás – whose unique niche in Argentine cinema and television was well-explicated by Quintin in the most recent issue of Cinema Scope – hardly seems oblivious to this fact. The details of the narratives are less important than how Llinás foregrounds the process of telling them – which he does partly via the most omnipresent (and to some, oppressive) voice-over since John Hurt’s clipped Dogville narration (and it has a similarly ironic-omniscient tone). It’s not really necessary to parse the specifics of the historias in Historias extraordinarias suffice it to say that the action is generally compelling even when it gets silly, and that there are flashes of truly poetic oddness (one man’s path takes him from a dull middle-man position to an abandoned church housing a dying lion!). (The closest analogue I could think of to these passages were the ever-interrupting/interrupted ghost stories from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie). But in addition to sidestepping the predictable tendency to dovetail his plot strands, Llinas boldy weaves and then dangles new ones, disrupting the already complicated simultaneous-triptych rhythm by locating and then expanding on some minor detail. Suggesting nothing so much as a cinematic game of Exquisite Corpse being played amongst a group of variably brilliant storytellers – and yet also palpably the work of a single controlling intelligence – Historias extraordinarias is one of the most narratively dense films in recent memory, It structuring conceit is three individual narratives, each loosely organized around the implicitly Borgesian notion of one man being drawn into the life and experiences of another. Sticking with the poker lexicon, Llinás’s film is an example of a director going all-in.
I was puzzled, to say the least: to use some poker terminology, I’d say that devoting 160 minutes to a film, even one you’re frustrated with, is the movie-going equivalent of being “pot-committed.” Gigante feels tweaked for maximum viewer safety, so that even those moments which are supposed to be sobering – like Camandule’s climactic lovelorn fit of rage, during which he trashes several supermarket aisles – come across as innocuous.ĭespite its title, Gigante is pretty slight stuff a better example of truth in advertising would be Argentine director Mario Llinás’ Historias extraordinarias, a film that caused one colleague to flee two-thirds of the way through its 4-hour running time. This is an outsider narrative that itself longs only to be loved.It’s not that hulking star Horacio Camandule is unappealing as the Montevidean Paul Blart, or that Biniez’ multimedia conceit, wherein our hero monitors his wage-slave beloved via security cameras, is un-clever (the running surveillance motif suggests a rom-com by Michael Haneke). This Silver Bear winner, which centers on an overweight, heavy-metal enthusiast working the night shift as a mall security guard in Montevideo, is already quite well-traveled, and while its popularity with festival audiences is understandable, I couldn’t get past the essential contradiction at its core. “An open mind is advised,” claim the (typically, very funny) trailers for this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival, but I will admit that I brought my preconceptions – and a nasty case of jet-lag – to the screening of Adrien Biniez’s Argentine-Uruguayan co-production Gigante.
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