Known for Acting
The second installment of the adventures of the Corsini Commando takes us this time to the Pampas plain, where Corsini grew up and forged a vision of the world that would accompany him throughout his life. The result of this excursion is an erratic wandering through the landscapes of the Homeland, its paradoxes and its ghosts: A land dreamed of by a newly arrived foreigner who imagined for himself a gaucho destiny that would never become completely real. Now then: is that not, in the end, the destiny of all things?
Situation 1: Mondongo, a duo of Argentinian artists, create a work inspired by The Art of colors, a treatise by Johannes Itten. Situation 2: A filmmaker begins a portrait of them.
“This is a film about the end of a friendship. It wasn’t meant to be. Fifteen years ago, they painted my portrait.” (Mariano Llinás)
Like a pair of wild detectives, two friends sniff around the library of eccentric writer and critic C.E. Feiling in search of the traces of a cult author, a punk dandy who swam against the current of Argentine literature.
Is this film about Clorindo Testa or not? Is it about the life of the director, about the life of his father, about the life of his country, or is it just one of those biographical films that proliferate at film festivals in which the narrator spends his time recounting family anecdotes and pulling old photos out of a box? This small, microscopic adventure, whose subtitle, stolen from the Savoyard Xavier de Maistre, could well be Voyage autour de mon père, navigates between these threats and others even worse.
Everyone is locked up, but Clementina and the man she's quarantined with won't stop working. We know little about him, and even less about her: we just see over and over again her mysterious face, which seems to defy everything.
On 9 July – Argentina’s Independence Day – Llinás sets off in Buenos Aires with his regular cameraman Agustín Mendilaharzu to re-record ‘Corsini interpreta a Blomberg y Maciel’, an album made in 1929 by lyricist Hector Pedro Blomberg and composer Enrique Maciel, as an ode to Juan Manuel de Rosas, leader of the Argentine Confederation.
In all the stories that Llinas presents to us here with his narrative flair, well-known from Extraordinary Stories, we see the same four actresses, but each time in different roles: Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, Laura Paredes – we also see them grow and get older.
Mariano, 16, inexplicably and without warning, shoots himself twice and improbably survives. Then, life goes on. His brother pursues a romance with a girl working at a fast-food joint, his mother takes off on a trip with a stranger, and Mariano recruits a woman to join his medieval wind ensemble.
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.
The story of a young couple, from beginning to end, from the euphoria of falling in love until the final days blurred and dark, is realized with an analytical eye and investigative zeal. How and why two people fall in love? What now? How quickly will they get into a relationship? When a relationship ends, and when should it end? Peter and Sofia, with its simple story of love, they become reflections of all those who, at twenty-five years have been in love.
The story of some neighborhood boys, narrated with an undoubted Borgian spirit. (ucine.edu.ar)
