ive laughed but no one on the screen has laughed really laughed until about halfway through this enthusiastically monstrous epic and halfway through the equally mad episode three when casterman who never laughs laughs uproariously alone in his office of death over a sleeping brussels and a bit later our four assassins who never laugh after being told to stop the iron jokes by their maybe commander begin laughing when she herself joins the joke and then immediately of course the denouement which of course isnt a denouement a pseudoconsummation of over five hours of beautiful ridiculousness as the killers confront their doom
thinking back over the films a little like thinking back over ones life you cant hold it all at once not even close i try to go sequential but this quickly collapses into digressions and questions and capers and i realize the film has done its work endlessly duplicating lifes endless distractions as the film does this to life and in itself it also does in us happily collapsing our solid safeties
it shouldnt work i keep thinking the first time i watch it theres no reason for me to be so consistently enthralled and yet i am the thing is hokey interminable anarchic the actresses as assassins are absurd their killings are painless silent bloodless their individual stories impossible beliefs never suspended the b movie schlockiness of the first episode stretched through the first four in their mammothian twelve hours
if arts supposed to hide artifice la flor fails completely its artifice is apparent and pervasive finally bursting exuberantly in the fourth episode as the film itself experiences a mental breakdown just about the time we are and we all enter the asylum together and flap like chickens and take on pantheonic names and conquer like the shadow casanova through collapse
what doesnt la flor explore? it travels prodigiously not only in time and space but theme and antitheme it goes into the darkness of the heart and out to the darkness of the night and as in extraordinary stories threads of divine comedy and melancholy are always in the weave so distant in the screen here so close in our attention
its perfect in its perfect imperfections in its calm and joyful refusal to provide answers or closure to even ask questions or tell stories and yet it tells stories and asks questions and answers and closure are ubiquitous tumbling over themselves like kittens
its a dance and painting a song and poem not a movie critics cite borges as an obvious inspiration but its more the museum of eternas novel with its infinite prologuings that becomes a novel by not becoming one
llinás says he hates storytelling experts and psychologists presumably in part because of their need like so many professionals to drag art into their domains and thereby possess it to explain and commoditize and psychologize and clinicize and biographize and formulaicize but fiction is the very grenade that explodes the oppositions when 301 and angel are killing across europe and pretending to be in love and in love and not in love and pretending not to be in love their pretendings more real than many realities a pretense of course thats already in a pretense and this nestedness of simulations already innately a function of film in la flor becomes an ouroboros of strange and infinite loops it becomes ourselves
if we set aside the party of the credits but who could? the final two episodes seem to slow down and not just because episode six cant be over that quickly taking us directly into dreamspace and the rebelswitchesmountiescoquettesmodels transform through their absence in episode five into oneiric meditations of continual gestation and muted freedoms from inexplicable enslavements
what do we say about the four? who are everywhere and nowhere like good gods havent their manifold identities silenced us through excess? havent their ungraspabilities gifted us with our own facelessness?
episode four is meta? the entire thing is meta
the director disappears the actresses disappear time disappears we disappear
some speak of finding ones voice but whats voice here? who is who? who speaks what? nothings authentic other than the authenticity of play
from vertov and buñuel and deren through schneemann and brakhage and sharits and hundreds of others actors cinematographers viewers characters have questioned the usurpation of film by conventional forces the expected story and through these questions extended natures most necessary diversities
but here we have la flor which doesnt technically fall into the experimentalfilm camp buts more experimental than most experimental films questioning through forms so entirely new but entirely old but entirely new that its hard to grasp the radicality of whats not being done of the smirking challenge to the very foundations of art philosophy politics love
