;)
Last but not least, in this miniseries of Latin American highlights from the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, we have a quartet of films that ponder return, whether to a place or a time, perchance a cultural root or the depths of literary history.
You have Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom, premiered at Cannes to rave reviews and which, effectively, marks a sequel, quasi-remake of the director’s quarter-century-old debut. The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs considers the work of Sara Flores, a Peruvian painter from the Amazon, while Life of Jorge Luis Borges is another madcap proposition from El Pampero Cine, focusing on director Mariano Llinás’ investigation into the titular writer. Also, it’s five and a half hours long and the funniest film at TIFF 51. Finally, Where the River Begins follows three youths in contemporary Bogotá as they leave behind their lives of urban misery and return to the Indigenous riverside village of their past, their shared legacy, their dreams…
DOUBLE FREEDOM, Lisandro Alonso
Films where, putatively, nothing happens can be some of the most rewarding experiences if you just let yourself surrender to their demands. Because, yes, they’re usually quite demanding works, denying viewers the option of passive viewing and dragging them, kicking and screaming, into a dialogue with the apparent nothingness on screen and their own reaction to this deliberate void. Not that Lisandro Alonso’s 2001 debut, La libertad, is such an abyss of a film. It’s quite brief, and technically denuded of any actual inaction as it follows a day in the life of a timber laborer played by Misael Saavedra.
It details his lonesome work, negotiations with a buyer of dubious integrity, and the simple matters of staying alive while so isolated among the trees, empty fields, and wide-open skies, with only a dog as occasional company. Within such a limited scope, the camera’s sudden disavowal of its human anchor or the bizarre techno score over the credits can’t help but feel earth-shattering, as shocking as the zap of a cattle prod. Double Freedom picks up where its predecessor left off by replicating it in an even more depurated fashion. If not for the aging of our leading man, one might suppose Alonso had recycled outtakes from the earlier project.
However, there’s more to it than a continuous pursuit of cinematic minimalism. As Double Freedom echoes its past, it expands and broadens the horizons of what one might think possible under its auteur’s rigorous approach. One day turns to two, one Saavedra becomes a pair of siblings, and a double movement takes us in distinct directions. Revisiting the fields through another eye transforms them on screen, evoking a dialogue between a couple of films separated by 25 years in a director’s career, in world cinema history, and the realities beyond the frame. While witnessing Double Freedom’s strange gambit, I couldn’t help but muse and dream of what such thinkers as Bazin or Deleuze might have made of it.
I think they’d have a field day with it. Especially with the film’s twisted notions of time out of sorts, both real and unreal, mimetic and mediated beyond any possibility of realism, no matter what the subjects and textures of the first half’s images might suggest. Double Freedom can be summarized in the image of two clocks side by side - one ticking away, the other stopped, frozen. Maybe that’s why sound is so memorable, stemming from the timepieces and the whispers of nature consumed as a commercial good, or all-consuming in its unassuming grandeur. Since I can’t help but trace connections between films, I can find another conversation that includes Double Freedom without leaving the TIFF 51 program.
Not with the shade of its former self, but texts like All of a Sudden, Tender Loving Care and Masc, where the material realities of labor and socially acceptable behavior collide with the oft dehumanizing ways our systems “care” for those who fall outside the norms. They are the marginalized and needy, the mad who are, perchance, the ones who’re truly free, clichéd and reductive as that conclusion might sound. Catalina Saavedra’s tic-ridden performance doesn’t really put forward that notion. Still, the camera around her does, liberated from considering time and place at their most capital-inclined function as a metronome for labor and a source of revenue.
THE HUMMINGBIRD PAINTS FRAGRANT SONGS, Èlia Gasull Balada & Matteo Norzi
No Midnight Madness offering or indie horror darling could hope to feature a scene as profoundly nightmarish as the one where Balada and Norzi film their subject, Sara Flores, as she sits in a meeting at some fashion house office. Similarly, no monster could hope to be as terrifying or as viscerally wrong in its own conception as the sight of the Peruvian artist’s geometrical patterns, a way for her to keep the Kené crafts of the Shipibo-Konibo nation alive, turned into a luxury purse for retail at high-end shops of the most exclusive clientele. In one gesture, one lingering shot of the object in all its wrongness and a cutaway to Flores’ impenetrable gaze, The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs synthesizes a disquieting thesis that weighs us down into the earth, crushed dead or as good as.
The only reason this movie’s being made, the only reason Sara Flores has been able to thrive and preserve her heritage, is the West’s embracing of it. But that embrace comes wrapped in barbed wire and self-interest, capital’s demand that everything be profitable, shaped into a product one can sell. Those same systems are the ones most responsible for destroying the Amazons where Flores and her fellow Shipino-Konibo people live, where their culture is founded, inextricable from the land. Sometimes, quite literally, as in an early sequence of the doc, the camera captures the long process of Flores’ textile art, how she repurposes pigments sourced from the natural world into painting materials, spreading her infinite geometry across cloth.
It’s an irreconcilable tension at the heart of The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs and, by far, its strongest observation. Because, beyond that, this is a fairly by-the-numbers affair, profiling an exoticized artist for the masses to consume. Don’t get me wrong. The footage is incredible, often finding a balletic quality in the repetitious quality of the ever-expanding geometries and the labor of their making, sketching community on the sides while draining all the warmth from the film once Flores leaves her home for the modern metropolis. In that office meeting, the assemblage doesn’t just suggest meaning, it screams it, the bloody ragged sound of a throat tearing itself apart in outrage. The rest of the film lacks that boldness, though the potential is there. Recut the existing material and you’ll probably get a non-fiction masterpiece.
LIFE OF JORGE LUIS BORGES, Mariano Llinás
Would you believe me if I told you that the fall festival season’s funniest and most engaging film is none other than a five-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a documentary about Argentinean director Mariano Llinás researching the life of famed author Jorge Luis Borges? Well, probably not, but your skepticism doesn't invalidate my truth. And trust, that no picture at TIFF 51 made me laugh quite as hard or as unexpectedly as this peripatetic pseudo-travelogue through archives and spaces imbued with memory, including some fairly ridiculous petty resentments against American places I shall be kind enough to leave unnamed. Please applaud my restraint.
Llinás surely could’ve used a tiny bit there, or when he spends an inordinate amount of time considering Borges’ letters only to throw the shadiest, pithiest dismissals at the other writers with which the doc’s subject corresponded. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s Llinás’ inability to hold back that gives Life of Jorge Luis Borges its appeal and a comedic tour de force that starts before the film does, when you consider the name on the title and the runtime on display. Because it would surely take a madman to so blatantly betray the legacy of a writer known for mastering the short story like few ever did by extending a tribute to him to such gigantic proportions.
None of this is accidental, a slip into indulgence or an internal contradiction. Instead, it’s another game from El Pampero Cine, the most playful film cooperative around whose works always move in ways that suggest a tone of alchemical instability, as if, at any moment, they completely transform into something fundamentally different. That tension underpins most of Life of Jorge Luis Borges, and it’s a great credit to Llinás’ skill as a storyteller, and even as a self-caricaturist, that he preserves that feeling even after the work has more than proven how in control, meticulously designed, and studiously assembled it is.
In many ways, it’s La Flor’s twelve-hour parade of metamorphosing narratives sublimated into the shape of a documentary that shouldn’t work yet does, with style and glorious self-assurance. More impressive still is how polysemic the whole thing can be. Surely, you’ve guessed that Life of Jorge Luis Borges is as much about the biographer as the man whose life is being investigated. Moreover, it’s about the biographer’s relationship to the work of researching and assembling a biography, the cineaste’s quarrel with his own medium, and, on a larger scale, Argentina staring into the black mirror of the camera lens and reckoning with itself and its history.
One could describe Life of Jorge Luis Borges as a multifaceted essay on all these matters and more. But first, one would need to detach the dourness folks tend to attach to academic pursuit or academism as a whole. If anything, this film shows that such institutions can take a joke at their own expense and even laugh along with it, celebrating the constant pursuit of knowledge while acknowledging the absurdities that arise when it is thus systematized, hierarchized, archived into bureaucratic memory holes cum nightmares. Truly, I doubt any film will ever make annotations on the margins of old yellowed documents feel more exhilarating, more ridiculous, more alive.
WHERE THE RIVER BEGINS, Juan Andrés Arango Garcia
The memory of a place that perhaps never existed as we remember it, or that has long ceased to be, can offer great comfort. In Where the River Begins, it becomes the main force propelling three youths up the Andágueda, in search of the ancestral land they’ve long been displaced from, denied by genocide, war and a history of violence that spreads like ink on water, until all you see is red. The one who leads this odyssey is Yajaira, an Indigenous woman from the Emberá village in the Chocó rainforest who still recalls that fateful night when her world, and those she loved, went up in flames that shone bright in the darkness and painted the river current bright orange.
Such images persist in Where the River Begins, long after the prologue introduces them as what could be remembrance, or a oneiric fantasy. Whatever it is, the vision, tragic though it feels, makes for a siren call far more appealing than the Bogotá city life where Yajaira, her daughter María, and teen delinquent Jhon have found themselves trapped. In returning to their origins, they reflect a hope that might be shared by many, both within and without these communities – a return to Eden, to a state of grace, to a “before” when everything was less painful prevails. And, when cultural erasure is on the line and the consequences of European colonialism still reverberate through the landscape, it’s hard not to believe.
If nothing else, one wants to believe. Perchance that is Yajaira’s case. It’s certainly true for María in her innocence and for Jhon in his search for atonement. But disappointments come hand in hand with the ecstatic, everlasting return, a trickier dramatic proposition than this cast, or indeed this script, seems able to accommodate. Juan Andrés Arango Garcia gets miracles out of his greenish non-actors, but even miracle makers have their limits. Furthermore, Neorealist technique can become the trap of convention rather than a liberating force, especially when Where the River Begins always thrives in lyricism, when Nicolas Canniccioni’s camera floats and Xi Feng’s cutting flows, when Frannie Holder lets her score sing the land’s abstracted lament and the tethers to material reality give way to something altogether “more.”
Double Freedom played Cannes, TIFF, and NYFF but is still searching for a US distributor. Life of Jorge Luis Borges took a similar journey, though it started in Venice. Nevertheless, the end result is the same. Let’s hope those higher-profile pictures get seen more widely, and that the same blessings fall on the lesser-known titles. They deserve it.