The evenings of our first week in isolation were devoted to La Flor, so here are some further episode by episode comments. After being a little skeptical after Episode One, my wife fell deeply, permanently in love with the film as soon as the scorpions appeared, as I'm sure many of us did and will do.
LA FLOR Episode 1
Rewatching this, the first is clearly the weakest segment, and it’s hard not to see it as a feint on the part of Llinas, as it’s by far the most narratively straightforward and rooted in a recognizable genre of all the episodes. If nothing else, it sets us up for the delightful, dizzying genre digression of Episode 2. It’s also formally the roughest of the six episodes, with jittery camerawork, digital artifacts and so forth, as if it were a quick and dirty horror movie. The shallow focus aesthetic which is explored in different ways throughout
La Flor is at its most primitive here, and it seems a little like an arbitrary stylistic choice until it pays off magnificently in a single long shot, as Valeria Correa backs away from the focal plane, into the darkness, and her face transforms through the simple loss of focus into an approximation of that of the mummy.
There are some neat narrative elaborations at play here, though they’re less apparent than the tricks and teases of the other stories as the dominant narrative is so direct. There’s the unresolved mystery of just what is going on with Elisa Carracajo’s character and her presumed sexual / psychological trauma, let alone how that would have – we assume – played into the central horror plot. There’s also the delightful juxtaposition of two fluid long takes of the same sequence of professional encounters, first with Carracajo’s hapless uncertainty, then with Laura Paredes authoritative problem solving. A brilliant way to deftly and swiftly sketch two contrasting characters in a completely natural way. And that character dynamic will be brilliantly flipped between these two actors in the following episode.
I find Episode 1 a lot of fun, but it’s almost deliberately tentative given how the narratives of the subsequent ones explode like fireworks.
LA FLOR Episode 2
Completely on its own terms, this episode would qualify as one of my favourite films of the last decade, and it’s not even my second favourite section of
La Flor. The narrative challenge Llinas sets himself here isn’t just the one of interruption (how to completely involve an audience in a story that they know ahead of time will not be resolved), but one of inaction.
He does it so expertly that I didn’t even realise he was doing it at all until a rewatch, but practically all the action of this substantial, intricately plotted episode is delivered as exposition. It’s a film about people explaining what’s already happened and what’s going to happen. The only exceptions – i.e. the scenes where the narrative advances in action on screen rather than dialogue – as far as I can see are the
Vertigo-like wordless tailing sequence (in which the action is, to say the least, opaque, and has to be subsequently explained to us anyway) and, crucially, the various performances of “I Am the Flame”, where the action is subtextual and only really becomes clear to us with the climactic rendition. It’s almost as if Llinas is taking the idea of the musical to a kind of extreme, wherein the musical numbers are the
only scenes that advance the plot in terms of action.
So how does Llinas make an almost entirely reported plot compelling? Fundamentally, he leans heavily on brilliant performances by his four leads, who animate their very different characters superbly. (This is the episode where the actresses really take charge of the film. Even though they were just about the only characters in Episode 1, the way they dominate a narrative involving more substantial male characters really highlights their agency here.) Further, it’s good dialogue, that reveals character, character relations and subtextual nuances right alongside the big plot points. It’s also very carefully constructed to maximise intrigue by drip-feeding information, or by creating and resolving puzzles by providing changing perspectives on events (the multiple versions of the meeting of Ricky and Vittoria that we hear about are the most obvious example of this). That elegance of construction applies both to the interiors of various plot strands as well as the macro- level, when we’re blindsided by the wild left-turn the narrative takes midway through, or when the two main plots finally collide is a most satisfying moment of deliberate frustration.
Llinas is also cueing us into some of the self-reflexive games that will overtake the film later on, as in Andrea Nigro’s great speech about how she knows she’s not the heroine of the story and not even (in a very pleasing moment of character insight) the enemy of the heroine.
LA FLOR Episode 3
We watched this episode over three nights, and I have to say it worked much better in one big day-long chunk, mostly because of the gloriously perverse accelerating / decelerating structure, with the approach to the film’s climax become more and more urgent (THREE HOURS BEFORE THEY COME TO KILL THEM) at the same time as the flashback interruptions become longer and longer, till we’re actually watching a series of mini-movies in between the fragments of the main plot.
For all the structural games and narrative detours, this is – along with episode one - the most straightforward of the episodes. It largely remains within a recognizable genre (the spy film - although it wanders all over the place within that genre) and has a clear master narrative (with a lot of fussing, fritzing and fiddling in the background). There’s not much plot discussion needed, and much of the fun is watching that plot unfold anyway.
This is also the episode where the actresses are at the peak of their mastery. Our four stars are together as a team for most of the time, and they’re even enhanced by a quartet of doppelgangers. Although the narrative is one of sinister men commanding, manipulating and betraying women, the story as it unfolds is one of female rebellion, where the male mastery proves to be illusory and the women are the ones with true agency. Which sets us up nicely for the radical confusions of Episode 4.
LA FLOR Episode 4
I’m really going to have to limit myself to vague generalities for this episode (and probably beyond), because this one really does rely on surprise and awareness of everything that’s come before.
Second time around it was just as delightful and hilarious as my first viewing. It synthesizes many elements from the rest of the film along with early Greenaway, late Godard and plenty of Ruiz at the height of his deadpan ridiculousness.
The resolution to the director’s impasse is so convoluted, perfect and ingenious that I’m compelled to exclaim “Eureka!” right along with him.
This time through, I got an idea of another solution to one of the film’s mysteries, which is, of course, even weirder than the problem initially posed:
The director has – by witchcraft, naturally - either been transformed into, or swapped places with, the historical Casanova – i.e. the mysterious archaic Italian in the asylum who’s irresistible to women.
And that breathtaking closing sequence is even more poignant on a rewatch
because we now know that this is the last clear glimpse we will have of the four female stars, as they’re elided from Episode 5 and obscured in Episode 6.
I think I might have to spoiler this completely for the uninitiated.
Llinas’ deviously fulfils and flouts his opening promises by offering up as the only episode “with a beginning and an ending” a remake of a famously incomplete film with no middle, which is additionally shorn of its original ending (though he includes the original soundtrack of that ending in the middle of the otherwise silent film.)
This episode is in obvious ways the odd one out, but I like the way it operates on a structural level. It’s an answer to the concerns of dominance played out comically in Episode 4; it’s a wholly visual episode in contrast to its symmetrical partner Episode 2, which was primarily verbal. It begins an exploration of the cinematic past that continues in the final episode (and indeed extends back to the prehistory of cinema.)
This is such a great, mysterious and unexpected way to conclude the film, with the dispersal of the actresses into a vast landscape (and, thanks to the unusual technique used, into the screen). It’s melancholy and joyous, as is the extended coda which I find just as beautiful and emotional as the rest of the episode.