X arrives in a small town and witnesses a violent act; Z takes the job of a dead manager and discovers that he had 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.
EN
“His subversive gesture is not pessimistic but merely creative. It is full of joy, with the pleasure of mastering, sharing and getting lost in the artifice of storytelling. Historias Extraordinarias confirms that cinema as a narrative discipline still has much to offer. It just needs not to fall into the hands of bureaucrats and festival snatchers, and resist among those who love, who would give their lives for another roll of dice in the realization of their art.”
Matías Piñeiro1
“A mysterious and slippery object no matter which of its many angles you examine it from, Mariano Llinás’s Historias extraordinarias (“Extraordinary Stories”) seemed to arrive out of nowhere in 2009. This exceedingly strange bundle of nested narratives dared to introduce scores of characters and storylines (some rich tributaries, others dead ends), perspectives and locales (Mozambique-for-India, the Salado River) with an almost ceaseless stream of omniscient voiceovers. Despite the recklessly unconventional approach, the film more than delivers on the come-hither promise of its title, blending elements of existential detective fiction, romantic intrigue, and Monte Hellman–esque road movie in a propulsive worlds-within-worlds metaconstruct that makes one forget all about its shabby digital-video format and audacious 245-minute running time—not to mention the incredible fact that it was made for $50,000. Novelistic in scope and ambition, ample in its temporal folds and ironic reversals, Historias is nothing less than an attempt to reorder cinema’s priorities around the act of dramatic narration, to question the nature of fiction itself, drawing on the fables and storytelling traditions of yesteryear. Jorge Luis Borges could not have written it better himself.”
Damon Smith2
