WTF is Clorindo Testa? If you don’t know beforehand, you’re not likely to emerge from Llinás’ film much the wiser. In a similar vein to Citarella’s Las Poetas Visitan a Juana Bignozzi, also from the Pampero stable, the director uses the commission of a film about the Argentine architect as a vehicle to interrogate the very idea of the documentary biopic, stripping out most of the bio in the process. The result is playful, frustrating, laugh-out-loud funny, and inevitably polarising. People come to the film to find out about Clorindo Testa, and leave either dazzled or ennervated by Llinás and his Rioplatense playfulness. It may be an acquired taste (but then so is cinema these days, and documentaries even more so), but there’s something enchanting about Llinás’ determination to go against the grain. When he shows the work-in-progress to friends and ex-wife, the ubiquitous Laura Paredes, they criticise him for making a film about himself, whilst he lurks at the back of the shot, raising his eyebrows. It’s all very arch, very offbeat, but it’s also great to see someone being given plata and taking the attitude that he’s going to do what he wants with it, even when everyone is telling him he’s in the wrong. In a medium that is so much formed by the compromise of artistic vision and the importance of treading a populist line, Llinás and Pampero remain a shining light on behalf of maverick self-indulgent genius.
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