Historias extraordinarias by Mariano Llinás

“In the beginning, my intention was to make a movie that was the closest thing to a novel.” This is the dangerous assertion of Mariano Llinas, the Argentinean director of Historias Extraordinarias, a controversial and prize-winning film first released in 2008. To propose a new and fearless approach to the incestuous relationship between cinema and literature might not have been the easiest gamble to take. The risks: the construction of three different storytellers, the avoidance of almost all dialogue, and the staging of a thousand and one stories in a four hour film.

The film is constructed on two main narrative levels. The first consists of the stories of X, Z and H, three lonely men who literally never speak about themselves. The second is created as these three men begin to approach the mysterious lives of others, to the point of rebuilding, picking apart, and finally reinventing them. X’s curiosity over what seems to be a vendetta ends up being an imaginative exercise which is only possible in solitude. Z cancels his personal story and goes into the intricate recesses of a wild animal trader. H’s story is also generated by others: two neighbours who get into a ridiculous dispute about the past of a hydroelectric power company. These narrative processes produce a strange but endearing complicity between the curious characters, the inquisitive narrators and the patient audience.

Our storytellers do not use the image to explain. We are invited into a game: the three only act as if they were literary narrators. Telling becomes an obsession recalling the meticulous reasoning of classic literature’s finest detectives. However, this reminiscence is essentially a lack of respect, a dangerous exercise in creativity. It becomes about solving a mystery, only the methods of finding a resolution respond to an illogical imagination rather than logic or reason. The same imagination that makes this cinematic experience an extraordinary challenge.

Mary Carmen Molina Ergueta