La Flor
(La Flor)

A film in episodes – six to be precise (screened in four parts) – with a runtime of fourteen hours, La Flor, like Mariano Llinás’s previous film, Extraordinary Stories (2008, screened at the 2009 3 Continents Festival) resembles a labyrinthine paper chase. Contrary to the ambitions of too many films, films, La Flor extols the pleasure of an anthology, of playing with cinema to tell stories, all kinds of stories: a fantastic film, a musical melodrama, an intercontinental espionage story, a fourth unfathomable and dizzying episode, the temptation of offering the remake of a French cinema classic, then a primitive film… During these fourteen hours, the cinema has the time to remember all of its ages, speak all languages, be a fantasy, a place of possible futures. And also time for the four lead actresses who appear in each episode to change costumes, faces and emotions. A film paradoxically exhilarating and obscure. JB