Life of Jorge Luis Borges Review: Mariano Llinás’ Three-Part Sleuthing Travelogue Is A Film To Live Inside

Pioneering Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás is the truest inheritor of the Borgesian tradition with a vision of cinema that trumps settled notions. There are no limits or a stiffening of what cinema can be allowed to do. Llinás co-founded Argentina’s, a radical El Pampero Cine collective, a group that includes the other great filmmaker of our times, Laura Citarella. In his latest massive undertaking, Life of Jorge Luis Borges, Llinás sculpts a new form of the creative biography. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival in the Open – Non-Fiction section, this nearly six-hour saga flirts with the tether of creative possibility. An extensive foray into the life, work and politics of Jorges Luis Borges, who saw literature as a kingdom and books the only nation to believe in, the film achieves its mammoth scale through the smallest, most minute interventions. Llinás has no interest in a straightforward chronicle, a regular documentary's beats. His probing builds through interruptions and flickering curiosities, stretching as far from the linear and conventional as possible.

Teaming up with Borges expert Ernesto Montequín, Llinás embarks on an epic exploration of the 20^th century literary giant’s life and philosophy. The two go sleuthing through a selection of literary texts, scanning variations between drafts. Often, a magnifying glass literally juts through the frame. A record of a writer’s “vacillations” gleams in these elaborate sections. Llinás also lays down the primary agenda clear at the very outset. A foundation responsible for housing Borgesian objects and artefacts commissioned the originary project which eventually took zanier turns. Words were Borges’ homeland, Llinás reaffirms at the opening. “No one before him conceived of books as a territory”, he adds, wondering the writer could almost be called a martyr. Yet, the filmmaker is quick to undercut the same assumption, stressing how Borges himself would have scoffed at it.

Like any other El Pampero production, this film is charged with pure, uncontainable sense of freedom-aesthetic, narrative and political. Its storytelling principle is more errant and unruly, prone to endless detour. A latter quote is key: “life enters writing through digression”. The same applies to cinema. Fiction and life meld and crash into each other. The real and the fabricated, the witnessed and the constructed– Llinás recognises and revels in a worldview that privileges no solid demarcation between them. Everything is a fluid adventure, scattering in several chaotic, restless directions, obeying its own singular logic and rhythm. Llinás’ voiceover hems through this odyssey through interpretations, humorous and self-aware.

The cinematic genre breaks away from any neat biographical account, turning delightfully unwieldy, messy and fragmented. Life of Jorge Luis Borges strays through places Borges lived in, passed through and alluded to in his work. This leads the filmmaker from the towns of Buenos Aires to Geneva to Texas to Uruguay to Iceland to China. The film nods to Borges’ imagined professional rivalries, the women in his life, most of whom were also invented loves. There’s ample space for contradictions and regrets, especially when Llinás fully tilts in the final part into Borges’ deeply questionable, political convictions. The film accommodates the grievous lapses in judgement that also cost him a Nobel Prize. It tallies the several accusations against Borges through the framework of an exchange with actor Laura Paredes, an El Pampero regular, based upon a controversial interview with the author. A rundown of all the charges of Borges’ racist endorsement, casual defence of slavery and his justifying massacres of the indigenous is rattled in quick succession. He shifted from supporting Pinochet and military dictatorships to later vocally distancing himself and expressing his guilt.

In this film, you just don’t get a mere litany of chronological events. Rather, this tale is full of odd bends, looping into sublime indulgences. What blossoms is a slew of lovely, amusing moments and confessions, pleated into a spirit that interrogates. At one point, the filmmaker insists that initially he didn’t want to include the footage of a flock of geese. Yet, it found its way in. Comedy is unstoppable. He also talks of minor squabbles over retaining a technically inferior scrap of footage but a kindred connection makes him hold onto it and weave it in. Elsewhere, he compares the repetitive motions of an Icelandic geyser to circus artists.

Llinás’ admissions are endearing, like when he concedes being fooled by the postscript of a Borges story. Pondering if other readers had gotten the ending, he finally turns to the viewer, asking for honesty. Amidst such an expansive enterprise, the filmmaker never loses sight of human embarrassment, foibles and hitches. He lets you in on the process of even arriving at endings. Early in the first part, he comes across a image of wind-swept swans and supposes it’d really be a nice parting shot. But this is an artist who’s always zigzagging by, chasing some unseen force. More importantly, he’s comfortable inhabiting the unfinished, the unresolved. Yes, he’ll seek answers, but he’s equally wary of any seeming shape of finality. Behind every certainty lies yet another curve into the unknown.

The self-reflexive film invites you to reconstruct and reassemble nuggets of a hidden life. The filmmaker is wise enough to distance from any official biographies. He scrounges instead through the frayed edges of archives, peeking for suggestions and traces of a secret channel wherein the actual Borges resides. The literary excavations are embroidered onto a fabric of undimmed close attention. It’s a work of deduction, an ode to the art of informed hypothesising. Life of Jorge Luis Borges searches manuscripts, letters, postcards, diaries and a trove of photographs. Llinás is digging through layers and layers of red herrings, winding tunnels of clues and mistaken conjecture. The joy here isn’t so much about the eureka moment as it is in the snaky road up a hill. The sheer sense of play here is enough to enliven and invigorate contemporary cinema and its turgid temperament.

“A man dies and becomes many”, Llinás muses as the film ebbs down. Life of Jorge Luis Borges is bound to endure as one of the most disarming, dazzling displays of this truth. This is a film to get happily get lost in, one for returning to again and again.