balnearios (d mariano llinás)

Llinas’ first film is a blink-and-you-miss-it 80 mins long. Watching this, if he reminded me of anyone as a filmmaker it’s perhaps, no matter how tangential this might feel, Adam Curtis. An idiosyncratic vision which gives free rein to an intellectual playfulness. (Curtis might not like this word but all the same it seems appropriate). Llinas headed off towards the waters of fiction, whereas Curtis is all heavy-hitting politics, but watching their films feels like a similar experience. We are in the hands of a conjurer who will come up with unlikely associations and unpredictable combinations. They also both leave the viewer with the feeling that they are basking within the timeless waters of cinema. Even this reduced length film felt like it had an elastic timeframe. You never quite knew where you were headed or when the film might come to a natural conclusion. 

Balnearios, a word which is probably best translated as ‘resorts’ opens with some lovely archive footage of the Argentine and Uruguayan coast. The film is constructed out of various parts. There’s a section on the balnearios’ annual cycle, the transformation from the dead times of winter to the frenzy of summer. The film ends with an extended, warm-hearted section about an eccentric sculptor. At times the film feels like a slightly cobbled-together piece, a bricolage if you like, hints of a student movie, albeit one touched with brilliance. Towards the end of the first half of the film, however, there’s a section which is pure Llinas, anticipating Historias Extraordinarias. The story of a once-glorious, now decayed hotel is related via photos and recreated footage, detailing  how the hotel has passed through various hands in dodgy business dealings, at one point being owned by a fraudulent playboy with a French chanteuse wife. One of her songs plays balefully over images of the crumbling hotel. The sequence has a lazy Borgesian charm; an epic narrative recounted in ten minutes with a few broad brushstrokes, no more than a subset of the movie itself. A clear pointer for the direction in which this idiosyncratic filmmaker was headed.