EXTRAORDINARY STORIES

Filmmaker Mariano Llinás occupies a crucial yet unclassifiable place within contemporary Argentine and world cinema as an outlier who reinvents traditional forms of cinematic narrative in bold and wonderful defiance of the vanguard and mainstream alike. Rejecting the minimalist formalism loosely shared by many of today’s great film auteurs and the maximalist THEMES of award-driven industry movies, Llinás embraces cinema as a different kind of narrative art, a mode of intoxicating and enlightening storytelling in a constant state of radical potential.

In his astonishing debut film EXTRAORDINARY STORES, three unconnected tales each start off innocently enough and then veer into ever stranger, more fascinating realms.X arrives in a small town and witnesses a violent act; Z takes the job of a dead manager and discovers that he has a notebook written in code and a map; H is hired to go down a river and investigate a series of mysterious monoliths built on the shore. In this adventurous experiment in storytelling, secret identities, missing persons, lost treasures, exotic beasts and desperate criminals are only a few of the elements woven into a grand tapestry of mysteries.

There is a literary taproot to the boundless imagination of Llinás’ deeply cinematic masterworks, but the branches rise high into the cinematic firmament. The radically inventive writings of Borges, Pynchon and Bolaño are recognizable as clear inspirations for Llinás’ ceaselessly unspooling narrative adventures, but equally important, in tone and spirit, are the Romanticism of Robert Louis Stevenson, the chronicle adventures of Jack London and the fantasies of Jules Verne. Even closer still to the palpitating heart of EXTRAORDINARY STORIES are the films—the many, many films—that seem to have been lovingly devoured and reconstituted in novel but recognizable forms, genre films of all kinds, but most of all those deliberately minor and unfettered works, the B-films of the studio era created in a spirit of freedom not possible for bigger pictures; the kind of film, as Llinás says, “that the Americans used to make with their eyes closed and now cannot or do not want to anymore.” Llinás’ film renews the promise and adventure of cinematic narrative.