La Flor (part one) (Mariano Llinás, 2018) (Patreon)

Of course it is entirely too premature for me to say anything too intelligent about La Flor, since I am only in the middle of Section Two (I think). More specifically, I have seen the mummy episode and am in the middle of the Siempreverde / scorpion toxin double plot. But a few things seem provisionally clear.

1. Llinás' ensemble of four actresses seems to have been deliberately selected to function, physically speaking, as variations on a theme. It's not that they are difficult to tell apart from one another (they aren't), but that it can take a minute to figure out which one you're looking at. I suspect part of the La Flor project has to do with taking four somewhat similar women and having the viewer spend so much time with them that, by the end, we will know them better than we know certain of our relatives.

2. The use of music cues and stings as narrative / genre code is a fairly consistent maneuver Llinás employs. An otherwise benign or nondescript sequence suddenly becomes coded as "horror" or "suspense" because of the soundtrack and our understanding of the audio tropes being deployed. This actually reminds me a lot of Abigail Child's work, in particular her seven-part opus from the 80s, IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? Of course, Child is interested in using montage snippets and rapid sonic cues to call forth the narrative expectations and immediately dash them. She is Anton Webern to Llinás' Richard Wagner.

3. La Flor's gamesmanship with respect to storytelling, with tales embedded within tales and the very process of narration being treated as a human activity with which we make sense of our lives, is the stuff of great postmodern literature, and the fact that Llinás has built this massive construction as a piece of cinema is undeniably impressive. (We'll see how well he sustains it.) But thus far, it's hard to feel as if there's a lot at stake aside from the formal demonstration of its own principles. Sure, it's much more "serious" than, say, Andre Delvaux's Trilogy. But it doesn't feel as urgent as Apichatpong's Mysterious Object at Noon or especially Miguel Gomes' Arabian Nights, two works La Flor seems to superficially resemble.

4. Nevertheless, 3 1/2 hours in, La Flor is impressively engaging. I am not certain about Llinás' narrative tone or underlying themes (one of which seems to be the fecklessness and/or superfluousness of men), but I am obviously very interested to see how this plays out.