“Ok. It’s like this.”
Very early on in Mariano Llinàs’ Historias Extraordinarias, a character we will know only as Mr. X, an ordinary man on an obscurely-defined business trip to an Argentine backwater, finds himself unwittingly drawn into a difficult situation.
As one of the film’s eloquent and omnipresent narrators concisely describes it:
“When the episode ends, X has killed a man. He has witnessed a murder and is wanted by two killers. He has an envelope they want, and doesn’t know what’s inside it. He doesn’t know the killers or if they have seen them.
“He knows nothing.”
Knowing nothing is perhaps the main thematic undercurrent of this remarkable low-budget epic, clocking in at around 4.5 hours and shot on dirty-looking digital video. Two of the film’s main characters attempt to unearth or understand the stories of absent characters. The other is a minor character in a larger drama he never even begins to understand, a pawn in a dispute between two warring nobodies.
X (played director Mariano Llinàs) is drawn into a criminal conspiracy simply by the fact of observing a series of actions he never fully understand. Z (the excellent Argentine actor Walter Jakob) is a bureaucrat who takes over a small-town branch of an obscure government agency—the purpose of which he’s not even completely sure—and finds himself fascinated with the identity of his late predecessor, who, he finds, had secretly been working on an obscure and complicated scheme, known only to him. H is hired to document the last remaining stone monoliths left by an industrial concern in a failed project from decades before and his job, though he never knows it, is an essential element of a rivalry between a pair of small-time blowhards.
There is almost no dialogue. Instead, a trio of narrators (though if you don’t speak Spanish, you’ll be forgiven if you, like I did, in not realizing they’re not all the same guy) provide more or less all of the film’s expository material, talking constantly over a stream of images that sometimes dovetails perfectly with what they’re describing, that sometimes darts ahead or lags behind the narration.
The nod to Llinàs’ countryman Borges is obvious, but there’s also an Arabian Nights feel to the chaptered stories. A less obvious inspiration is Tintin, who I hear Llinàs claims he modeled the film on, down to the framing of specific shots.
It is an amazing and strange film. When I saw it last year at Festivalìssimo, a Montreal “Ibérolatinoamericain” film festival, I had been dreading it; on the festival’s jury and having to watch 20 movies in one week, I wasn’t looking forward to the 4-hour experimental entry. From the first five minutes, I was enthralled. We ended up giving the movie our “best picture” prize, as well as giving the best actor award to the narrator(s).
If you’re in Montreal, Historias Extraordinarias will be playing at the Cinéma du Parc this Sunday, April 4 at 1p.m. It may never come this way again, or not for a good long time, so I hope you can make it. You won’t regret it. See you there.
