VIFF 2009 | Extraordinary Stories at Schema : more than ethnic

VIFF 2009 | Extraordinary Stories

Extraordinary Stories
Argentina, 2008, 250min
DIR Mariano Llinas

ExtraordinaryStories 2.jpg

"Extraordinary" is an understatement. This film is crazy, cruel, and deeply original; it's excruciating and exhilarating all at the same time. True 'cinematic terrorism' - but in the very best of ways.

In this four-hour film, director Mariano Llinas presents us with three primary storylines, each of which details the absurd quest of a nameless man (known as X, Z, and H respectively). These silent protagonists have only one thing in common: they all find themselves thrust into wild goose chases, and continue their odysseys despite the fact that they have no idea what they're even looking for. X witnesses a murder, and then stays cooped in a hotel room for months, playing detective and growing increasingly obsessed with solving an unsolvable case. Z, a recently hired bureaucrat at The Federation (where none of the employees know or care what they're supposed to be doing), scours the countryside in order to piece together the mysterious past of his dead predecessor. H rows upriver, searching for the monoliths that he has been hired, for some reason beyond his grasp, to photograph.

This film is thoroughly postmodern in both form and content, and has many of the hallmarks of the "Theatre of the Absurd": cyclical and dizzyingly extensive plots, contempt for the concept of the well-made play, and anti-heroes who are forced to repeat absurd - and ultimately meaningless - actions.

The film is also deeply indebted to Jorge Luis Borges, and to the Latin American literary trope of the labyrinth. The labyrinth is referenced explicitly in the storyline of H, who travels up a river that "is nothing" and "leads nowhere" - "a maze of reeds and rushes."
The structure of the film itself mimics the labyrinth trope. In a way that is reminiscent of Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, it takes us through a series of storylines, some of which intersect and some of which drop off unexpectedly, just as if we'd stumbled upon a cul-de-sac in the maze of the film and had decided to turn around and try again.

The "terrorist" aspect of the film comes when you're just about to understand the whole story - about to see how all the pieces fit together, how all the stories interconnect - then, the storyline branches off, plummets into the abyss, and is abandoned. The film constantly dangles the promise of meaning before us, only to snatch it away again. Even the soundtrack echoes this cruel trick; it starts and stops, starts and stops, playing with our emotions. What's more, the excruciating slowness and repetitiveness of certain scenes lulls us into a false sense of security, only to then make us jump out of our seats when suddenly - boom! - a bomb explodes, or - roar! - a lion appears.

All of this combines to produce in the viewer a love-hate attitude toward director Llinas. Extraordinary Stories breaks all the traditional rules of filmmaking - no three-act structure, plenty of redundancy, practically perpetual voiceover narration - but to amazing effect, and in a clearly self-conscious and intentional way.

Schema Magazine's coverage of VIFF 2009 is sponsored by the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival