LA FLOR (The Flower, Mariano Llinás, Argentina 2018) is an outstanding contemporary film project: a director and his four actresses play around with cinema, with their playful urges knowing no bounds. They create fantastical spaces and couldn’t care less about sense, logic, and dramatic structure, even forgetting time in the process. Film history is their adventure playground, where they spent over ten years completing a nearly 14-hour work. Yet one can hardly speak of a closed story. LA FLOR is an open work in the very best sense, continually sprouting new images and blossoming afresh, a wander through genre cinema, divided into three chapters, six episodes, and eight acts. Mariano Llinás from the El Pampero Cine film collective and the acting troop Piel de Lava invite the audience to follow their intertwining narratives, which sometimes cross, but equally digress or simply peter out completely.

LA FLOR – CHAPTER 2, ACT 1 Four agents kidnap an already kidnapped Swedish scientist from a finca somewhere in South America to take him out of the country. They themselves are in the sights of an unpredictable gang of killers. In lengthy shots, the cool gazes and gestures of the 80s spy thriller are celebrated. No further action is needed.

LA FLOR – CHAPTER 2, ACT 2 The plot doesn’t play much of a role, with the focus lying instead on exploring the essence of the classic agent film. With shifts in location between London, Brussels and a divided Berlin. With recourse to a narrator in voiceover who knows more than the audience but isn’t willing to share that knowledge. With the man before the telephone who collects the information while only picking up the receiver from time to time.

LA FLOR – CHAPTER 2, ACT 3 Spy films involve disguises, masquerade. During the Cold War, two agents on a secret mission must constantly play a couple in the first flush of love. Yet in so doing, they come to mask the true feelings they have for one another.
(Arsenal Kino)