Paradox: should one write a review of La Flor, having only seen one third of the whole film? Under normal circumstances, the answer would be no. But La Flor is 808 minutes long. The first part alone is nearly three hours long. The film is made up of six stories, featuring the same four actresses, stories which are not connected. In the only part of the film which might be described as brief, the prologue, the filmmaker gives a rundown of each story, supplying an elegant diagram describing the shape of the film, a diagram which has the forma of a flower (or ‘flor’ in Spanish). The film, we are told, consists of four unfinished stories, another story which has a beginning, a middle and and an end, and a final story. Last night, in the company of Snr O, I watched the first two parts.
Llinás specialises in shaggy dog stories. Another three part epic, Historias Extraordinarias, used voiceover to construct three narratives over several hours which never really went anywhere. Something similar occurs here, even though there’s no private-eye style narration. The first tale is a self-consciously B-Movie Mummy story, of possession in the Andes. It’s rudimentary and effective. The second chapter is more complex. This tells the story of a singing duo, who were a couple, albeit a couple whose story has been fictionalised in order to create a false marketing myth. The conflict between the two singers leads to a highly charged, brilliant rendition of their hit song, a duet in which the couple use the song like a weapon with which to wage their ongoing conflict. There’s shades of a sixties french romantic drama at work, something quasi-Godardian, very nouvelle vague, with faces in profile dominating the screen and much use of depth of field.
Interweaved in this second story is another B-Movie strand, as one of the singer’s assistants is involved with a shadowy gang which is seeking to extract a serum for eternal youth from the venom of a “centurion scorpion”. The two narratives sit awkwardly within the same tale. The B-movie strand undercuts the potency of the music narrative. The chapter drags on, loses focus, becomes self-indulgent. Llinás’ temporal ambition, converting cinema into a kind of epic, oneiric poetry is revelatory. It sings of a lost art, part Abel Gance, part Homer. However, it feels as though the filmmaker is wary of permitting any kind of emotional engagement; he wants this to be a definitively ludic, Borgesian viewing experience, nothing more and nothing less.
Which left me, as a viewer, frustrated; wanting to see the other episodes to see if the film could rise above its addiction to intellectual tomfoolery. It seems more than likely that La Flor will acquire a cult status. Like Tarantino, Llinás is an auteur of self-indulgent brilliance. Whether the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts is something that can only be assessed after watching the film in its entirety. Perhaps it’s unfair to write this review without having seen the film as a whole; but then again it’s entirely within the spirit of La Flor’s ludic narrative philosophy to react in a manner which is not entirely coherent.
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