It’s fitting that the film starts with a mummy movie: in its heartfelt, head-on approach to genre, La Flor can be seen as an attempt to reanimate a succession of dead or dying forms. Many films in one, it thrives on multiplicity and abundance.
The results are often loose ends, tied hastily, even haphazardly, as well as broad emotional brushstrokes, with ample use of cultural shorthand. Yet these films can make for addictive, visually riveting viewing.
Ela Bittencourt
Ocak 2, 2019
La Flor, with its unprecedented length and madcap ambitions, its grand and giddy love of cinema, its reveling in erudite citation and homage, as much as its pulpy, get-dirty delve into B and B-genre disguises, constantly flirts with the real.
Andréa Picard
Ocak 2, 2019
It’s a grand house of fiction, and its host, Mariano Llinás, invites us to come in, stay, and explore its rooms, corners, and mirrors for an immersive and captivating experience.
Matías Piñeiro
Ocak 2, 2019
Quite simply, two great moments of release. New favourite images, new favourite memories. The two instances of "Black Diamond Bay" in the Benning and the audacious (saying something) final image ofLa Flor, one of the great movie-going experiences of my life. No further spoilers for those with the will as well as the means.
As with so many filmmakers working in what we might broadly call the art film tradition, Llinas is concerned with the problem of story, still often viewed as though it were a habit to be renewed or got clear of entirely—but Llinás, like Gomes, has taken an additive approach to revivify storytelling; he is interested not in paring down, but in piling on.
The thought of a shorter La Flor, the need to finish a story, the need to connect its threads, are utterly alien to the film and the experience of watching it. Indeed, that mere thing, the experience of watching it, is the primary reward that La Flor offers its viewers.
Key to the success of the project is his commitment to each genre—not their aesthetics, per se, but the way they operate on a formal level, and how they unconsciously reverberate in a sociohistorical context.
More than a meta comment on his own practice, it’s proof that Llinás has both the heart and the storytelling chops to back up his ambition. It might be an expression of similarly self-reflexive gallows humor that Llinás ends the film with a brief story of escape from captivity. The actresses, like the viewers, disperse into the expanse outside, liberated and in a sort of daze.
La Flor is not an attempt to redraw the boundaries of storytelling, but rather a creative experiment in rethinking, on a moment-by-moment basis, the nature and capacity of storytelling in a contemporary context.