La Flor

Any con­ver­sa­tion­al men­tion of Argen­tin­ian film­mak­er Mar­i­ano Llinás’ sec­ond nar­ra­tive fea­ture on the fes­ti­val cir­cuit over the last 12 months will have inevitably made swift ref­er­ence to its length. So let’s get this out of the way up top: La Flor runs at 808 min­utes. Which, when you think about it, is around the same length as a sin­gle sea­son of pres­tige television.

It’s a com­par­i­son worth mak­ing because La Flor, despite where it’s like­ly to end up play­ing, is about as far removed from any notion of the art­house cin­e­mat­ic endurance test as it’s pos­si­ble to get. You won’t find any 17 minute, fixed-cam­era shots of cows in a field. La Flor is a genre movie. Six genre movies, even. It plays in three parts, each with a cou­ple of inter­vals. Thir­teen-and-a-half hours breeze by.

Llinás intro­duces the project in its open­ing min­utes, explain­ing the struc­ture from a road­side pic­nic area. ​“The first episode could be regard­ed as a B‑movie, the kind that Amer­i­cans used to shoot with their eyes closed, and now just can’t shoot any­more.” And so we’re thrown into the Roger Cor­man school of film­mak­ing: an archae­o­log­i­cal dig and a cursed mum­my. The sto­ry doesn’t have an end­ing. With the excep­tion of part five – a remake of Jean Renoir’s 1946 short, Par­tie de Cam­pagne – none of the episodes do.

“A sort of musi­cal with a touch of mys­tery,” is how Llinás describes episode two, a jaw-drop­ping piece of Almodóvar-ian melo­dra­ma with a sub­plot fea­tur­ing a secre­tive cabal of sci­en­tists who seek the life-giv­ing prop­er­ties of a rare scorpion’s poi­son. Throw in mul­ti­ple allu­sions to Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go and you’re not even half way there. By the end of this sec­ond episode, you’ll be start­ing to think that Llinás can do just about any­thing, and that with 10 hours still to go, he prob­a­bly will.

Episode three is the cen­tre­piece, a spy movie that takes up the entire­ty of the sec­ond part’s six hours. A quar­tet of kick­ass female assas­sins – played by the same four actress­es who appear across each of La Flor’s episodes in dif­fer­ent roles – are being hunt­ed down by a rival crew. Quentin Taran­ti­no pay­ing lo-fi trib­ute to the crime seri­als of Louis Feuil­lade gives a sense of it, but Kill Bill wish­es it were this much fun.

The final three, short­est episodes make up La Flor’s third part. The fun­ni­est revolves around a Llinás proxy’s epic film project fail­ing to progress as he trav­els the coun­try search­ing for the per­fect cher­ry blos­som, his actress­es rebelling – and turn­ing into witch­es – while he’s off mak­ing end­less pil­low shots of trees in bloom.

“I’d say the movie is about them, and, some­how, for them,” says Llinás of his female cast in the open­ing pro­logue, and La Flor qui­et­ly sub­stan­ti­ates its fem­i­nist cre­den­tials through­out, with­out the embar­rass­ment of draw­ing atten­tion to them.

Need­less to say, Llinás treats genre with the utmost seri­ous­ness, ful­ly attuned to its myr­i­ad decon­struc­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties and sur­face enter­tain­ment val­ue. Won­drous­ly play­ful and end­less­ly inven­tive, there’s lit­tle ques­tion that La Flor rep­re­sents one of the cin­e­mat­ic events of the year. Its length might sug­gest a home view­ing fur­ther down the line, but this belongs on the big screen – the sheer plea­sures of it, hour by hour, can’t be stat­ed strong­ly enough.