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

Well past the halfway point of this monster, and I must say I am feeling rather ambivalent. There is a formal elegance underpinning La Flor that seems undeniable. The more I see of Llinás' overall architecture, the clearer it becomes that he has set out to create a cinematic work with the expansiveness of Joyce or Proust, even as his sensibility -- gamesmanship, narratological self-consciousness -- is more in line with folks like Borges or David Foster Wallace. If we consider La Flor just in terms of its design (something its maker in some ways encourages, going so far as to title the film after its own structural diagram), it is fairly staggering.

But structural filmmakers, in the classic sense, tended to reduce the emphasis on plot and narrative, or at least mitigate it, so that you would have expansive, compendium works that didn't allude to conventional cinematic engagement. Michael Snow's Rameau's Nephew is essentially a series of visual and sound gags. Hollis Frampton's Magellan cycle is a group of individual films that uses calendar time as its connective tissue. Even a relatively compact work of expansion, Ken Jacobs' Tom, Tom the Piper's Son, limits itself to the exploration of a single filmic object, only implying its own endless iterability.

The trouble with La Flor, by contrast, is that Llinás seems equally committed to his overarching structure and a demonstration of the organizational codes of genre, and sometimes that's just a bit too much to manage all at once. One way to possibly think of Act Two of La Flor is as a kind of Proustian hypertext. There is a dominant spy plot, which pits two groups of four women against each other in a vague mission involving as kidnapped scientist. Llinás slowly moves us through the paces of the primary spy action, but is continually pulling us away for extended excurses involving the backstory of the individual characters.

This approach presents certain difficulties. For one, La Flor progresses as a linear, time-based artwork, and so these dips into the potentially deeper resonance of the (quite banal) spy vs. spy story at hand are fully determined by Llinás. Not a problem per se, except that they are clearly intended to connote the more free-flowing departure of drifting attention, and instead operate as digression and delay. In fact, the primary plot is so baggy and uninteresting (admittedly, your mileage may vary) that these extended subplots make us question why we are engaged with the primary plot in the first place.

This could very well be Llinás’' point. There is a general sense of ennui and futility that runs through several of the stories, culminating with the tale of Agent 50 and the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union. This segment, as well as the introduction of the idea of the "tse tse fly" (i.e. the mole who eventually sympathizes with the enemies with whom she is embedded), imply that perhaps Act Two is, on a meta-level, about lots of complicated lives leading up to a mission that in itself is ultimately meaningless. This could be Llinás' way of casting doubt on genre's capacity to serve as a container for more direct emotional content.

At the same time, I am not completely convinced that La Flor is working as seamlessly as it thinks it is. Act Two has fairly direct homages to Godard (the use of Weekend-like intertitles; the Manet segment that recalls Historie(s) du cinéma) and Chris Marker (a La Jetée inspired sequence), and there is a stilted quality and comical bloodlessness to the violence that seems perhaps indirectly inspired by Hal Hartlety. The ostentatiously bad dubbing clearly asks us to reflect on the artificiality of what we're seeing. And yet, Llínas' globetrotting is equally artificial, providing us with shots of the Eiffel Tower and the Kremlin as if to make a joke of the production's international status. Moments like this, or the ridiculousness of Mac the Knife, feel a bit too arch, as though La Flor is too convinced of its own cleverness.

And then there's the fact that, as we get deeper and deeper into this film, it becomes clear that this is a rare instance of a very long film using length as a formal parameter for its own sake, rather than as a consequence of other formal decisions. La Flor is more akin to Hitler, a Film From Germany than, say, Satantango. The sheer fact that there is so much of it, that watching it represents a giant commitment (if not an ordeal), seems to be encoded into its overall meaning. And so far, based on what I have seen Llínas do with that expansiveness, I am skeptical. Stories within stories, genre expectation versus the unpredictability of human desire . . . I really didn't expect to feel so early on like I had this film's number.