If there’s any living director that seems to have taken the idea that cinema is meant to tell stories literally, that’s Mariano Llinás. Llinás, an Argentine, has directed up to now three features over the span of 20 years, and all of them seem to have been born from a visceral fear, one that seems to even surpass the one felt by Scheherazade, at the thought that stories have an ending, whether we like it or not. It’s enough to take a look at the mileage of these films – the first, a documentary called Balnearios, is one hour and twenty minutes long; his latest, La Flor, clocks in at almost fourteen hours – to see that Llinás’s appetite for storytelling has become increasingly acute; in so doing, he voluptuously defies the exploitation-driven imperatives of the film market. Between these two titles, Historias extraordinarias (4 hours) makes for an excellent synthesis of Llinás’ arsenal of games and contraptions that he uses to construct his unique films, which seem to hail from the times when cinema still allowed itself to weave all kinds of stories at ease.

One more thing: if cinema is a matter of time, then I’m not really sure how many filmmakers are capable of filling the space of four hours with so many wonderfully delirious stories and to make them seem as if they’re flashing before our eyes in an instant. In Historias extraordinarias, Llinás recounts three stories: the first is about a man that murders another man while he’s on a business trip, in a sort of a macabre gag, and then finds himself in the middle of a shady business that involves paid assassins and acts of revenge; the second one centers on a man that discovers the mysterious notebook of another man and puts it in his mind to entangle the enigma that is hidden within its pages; the third tells the story of a man that is tasked with a strange mission – to take pictures of some blocks of stones that are placed along the course of a river – which, at one point, takes a sudden turn. As the stories illuminate the shadows, other questions start to pop up: what is the first man doing out there, in the middle of nowhere? How did the second man end on the farm of an Italian? But what’s the third guy doing in a military unit? And so on, and so forth.

It’s clear – from this attempt at summarizing the film – that the meandering plot of the film is anything but clear. Again and again, Llinás sees that he is unable to resist the expansive temptation that makes a given story split apart into who-knows-how-many, increasingly mind-boggling subplots (the apex of which he reaches in La Flor, where one single story from within is longer than this entire film). Llinás is the type of aficionado that has taken the history of art by storm, running through an entire back catalog at once and developing certain fixations here and there, especially on the terrain of pop culture. Is he a megalomaniacal erudite? Rather, a hedonistic adventurer that is hailing both from Cervantes (his picaresque side), as well as Raúl Ruiz (his oneiric storyteller side), from Robert Bresson (the notion that sound must sometimes give a jolt to the image) and from série noire, the French collection of French cop novels which he has seemingly devoured whole. It’s thus clear that any attempt at surveying his method is as futile as the one to resume his films. Roughly put, Llinás’ and his actors’ art aims at tempting the curious explorer that lies in every one of us at any price and to assure us that, once you’ve made it to the surface, you’re in good hands. In contrast to us – the ones that don’t know anything – Llinás never loses sight of the North, and the final destination of this James Bond-like venture (uncoincidentally, one of the stories in La Flor will be about spies) seems to always be clear to him.

Historias extraordinarias reinvents the schematics of storytelling at a global scale and re-situates things under the sign of adventure. A maniacal minstrel, Llinás is the kind of person to whom any landscape appears as a map towards a treasure island, any man – a legendary biography standing on two legs, any fun fact – an extraordinary quest that must be told. With their unbridled impulse at solving every single mystery – the truth behind the conspiracy being like a pearl to a clam, or, to make use of one of the film’s most haunting contrivances, a dying lion abandoned in a shed buried in the depths of the Argentinean pampas – the characters of the film are made from a matter that is increasingly rare nowadays. To the degree to which the crisis of scriptwriting has conspicuously (some say) ravaged cinema for the past decades, this film plays the rules of an older game – living to tell one’s story and vice-versa – and to show that there may still be things left to say, on the condition that these things deserve the effort.

On the other hand, if there is any given filmmaker that sets his entire weight behind a rambling voice that sounds from off-screen to the detriment of the images that, with their faded tones of gray, supply a stream of stock visuals, then Llinás is our man. Because Llinás, who is interested in the peak of writing, looks at images with circumspection, as if he were saying that they must never truly be believed – just as well as he seems to have some ideas of his own about beauty. And beauty, in this film that brings a cocaine-addled element to the definition of storytelling, only arises under the shape of unexpected flashes: for example, the moment when, after a thundering rainstorm, a river flows over and everything surrounding it becomes an ocean; or the sweet resonance of the adjectives that roll out from the Spanish voice-over, with sharp precision. Finally, all of these serve a simple idea, which is that some films do rewrite the coordinates of the world; in other words, films that emerged from the midst of familiarity and end up showing us everything under a different shape. Such as Historias extraordinarias, for example.

Historias extraordinarias is available in the MUBI Library.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.