“One of the most tremendous films in recent years.”

Playing in this year’s New York Film Festival’s Currents section is the latest film from Argentine director Mariano Llinás, Life of Jorge Luis Borges. The film is Llinás’ directorial follow-up to his fourteen-hour masterpiece La Flor (2018), but since then he has written other works such as Azor (2021) and produced other films such as Trenque Lauquen (2022), directed by his wife Laura Citarella, through the El Pampero Cine collective. Life of Jorge Luis Borges breaks new ground for Llinás as he tackles the documentary form over a runtime of around five hours and forty minutes, while remaining highly playful and similar in his filmmaking style and themes. The film is simultaneously a documentary about the legendary Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and an exploration of Llinás’ own relationship with cinema and even Argentine history. While the lengthy runtime may seem daunting, the film is a tremendous and towering achievement, and another masterpiece from the director.

The film has many different moving structural pieces. First, due to its length, Llinás splits it into three sections, with intermissions between them. Part One lasts about two hours, Part Two about an hour and a half, and Part Three about an hour and forty minutes, with the rest of the runtime consisting of the intermissions. Second, this isn’t the only unusual thing about the structure. Llinás uses the Spanish alphabet to segment the film. To dive more into that, the letter A represents Switzerland, a place where Borges spent some of his early life and also where he died. The letter B represents New York City, where a large collection of objects related to Borges exists. This continues through the letter Z, but often Llinás does not present the letters directly, instead moving through different objects, events, or people from Borges’ life to represent each letter. Some of the sections feature artwork or magazine articles about Borges, while others focus on places he traveled, and some are more artistic parts of the film which reenact conversations he had with journalists or other figures. This structure is all very compelling, as the life of Borges is traced through places and objects. The ways in which Llinás moves between multiple topics keeps the film ever interesting and sustained. Third, there is another way the film is segmented, and that’s by starting at the end of Borges’ life with his time in Geneva, Switzerland, and then jumping back to his youth. The alphabet letters and the changing time periods don’t seem like they should work on paper, but they make the film captivating and unpredictable, creating a much stronger story of Borges’ life without succumbing to any traditional documentary didacticism or turgidity.

Outside of the structure, Llinás completely delves into Borges’ life. He traces Borges’ childhood in and around Buenos Aires, his relationship with his close friend and peer, the revered author Adolfo Bioy Casares, his time spent in Geneva, his relationship with his wife, and his life in Uruguay and in the provinces of Buenos Aires. Llinás also focuses on Borges’ relationship with his mother, Borges’ blindness, and his professional capacity as both a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and as the director of the National Library of Argentina. Within the structure, Llinás and his cameraman drive to various parts of Buenos Aires and Argentina to trace the places where Borges lived. He does the same by taking car trips to the Uruguay border, where Borges set a short story, and by taking a flight to Texas to show where Borges was a professor, among many other excursions. 

By living Borges’ life on screen and presenting these locations, the film becomes extremely exciting and personal. Llinás does not just tell us where Borges was, but shows us, creating a truly lived-in documentary, one where each location and literary work becomes a part of the story. We trace the Buenos Aires block where he lived as a child, and learn that one of the roads on the block has since been renamed Jorge Luis Borges Boulevard. We see the congenial home where Borges was conceived, and we visit the outside of the apartment where he famously hit his head on a metal pole while walking up the stairs (which later became a major plot point in Borges’ short story El Sur (1953).

Llinás is constantly asking where Borges actually lived, visited, and worked. Many of these locations shown in the film no longer exist or have been heavily changed. For example, as Llinás attempts to find a resort that Borges would often visit in order to relax, he discovers that it is gone. He spends hours looking for it and must return another day, only to find out that a simple statue now stands where the resort once thrived. The director also attempts to find the railway station where Borges would have gone when he was fleeing his wife as his marriage was ending, only to learn there is no rail station anymore, but just a few markings. Llinás travels to Iceland to find a hotel where Borges met a mistress, only to discover that it’s no longer standing. The tracing and viewing of these places, most of which existed in the last century, is haunting and creates a sort of supernatural history of how quickly society changes and evolves.

In many ways, the film is as much a biography of Argentina as it is of Borges, showing how places have evolved in the country. Llinás does not miss the darker side of Borges, who sometimes had a tendency to support fascist governments. This latter part of the film is often dark and exhilarating, as we find that Borges flew to Chile to support the Pinochet regime. Later, when Videla came to power in the military coup in Argentina, Borges initially congratulated him and supported him. However, Llinás is too great a filmmaker to be so reductive, as he shows Borges later distancing himself from Videla after meeting the dictator in person. Afterward, when Borges is no longer hiding himself from the genocidal atrocities of the Videla regime and he becomes aware of the disappearances and killings, Borges remarks, “¡Que Horror!” Borges appears to struggle with his initial support for Videla and other fascist governments, and this segment of the film is not only thrilling but entirely devastating, and makes him such a complex and developed subject for the documentary. Much of Argentina’s history is displayed in the film, and this harrowing portion of the country’s, and even greater Latin America’s history is a major focus due to how many lives are still affected by the results of the mass killings and disappearances that occurred in the 1970s and ’80s. Seeing an Argentine literary symbol being portrayed as reacting and awakening to these atrocities makes the film a greater testament to the Argentine struggle.

Just as the film can be considered a biography of both Borges and Argentina, it also represents a portion of Llinás’ own life. At many points in the film, it is shown or posited that Borges has been leaving notes for his biography. For example, he would write footnotes for works that were later found not to exist in published versions, and leave many manuscripts or initial versions showing in detail how he would edit his own work. These would later be deleted in published works but exist in the archives. Similarly, he made notes about relationships with lovers that likely never happened. 

This also illustrates how Llinás makes the film very much about himself. Llinás drives around with his wife and children to find places where Borges once lived even though Llinás did not need to include his own family in the film. There are also segments entirely based on Llinás’ own travels, such as touring the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, in order to see it, while the director was visiting Texas to follow Borges’ time as a professor in Austin. Llinás notes that he only went to the Alamo because he felt like it and not because he was tracing Borges. We see moments of Llinás shirtless and other scenes of him editing the film. Laura Paredes, a frequent acting contributor to Llinás’ films, plays a role in reading lines that Borges once spoke. So much of the film is about Llinás’ own relationship with filmmaking, how he structures his films, and his preoccupations with Argentine culture. Everything seems to be about Borges, and then, as you pull back a layer, you see that it’s about Argentina, but then there is a third layer, where you see that it’s about this segment in Llinás’ own life. And how, in years to come, Life of Jorge Luis Borges could be used as evidence of Llinás’ journey to create his own biography.

This masterful layering is buoyed by the humor of the film. When Llinás visits Texas, he says, “They took half of Mexico’s territory for this?” and compares Austin to the capital of a province in Paraguay or Bolivia. Anyone familiar with Argentine culture will know it’s a backhanded joke to compare Austin to what would be considered these backwater areas. Llinás also likens the Alamo to “just a theme park” and says that the Texas outskirts “never ended” and that “evil is a suburb of a rural town.” There is also a segment where Llinás highlights Borges’ wife’s insistence on taking photos of everything in the Rockefeller house in New England, even their bathroom, and her rivalry with one of Borges’ assistants, which ends up with a comedic controversy about her fur coat that had to be shipped back to Argentina from the United States. These are just a few of the many comedic and absurd moments that fill the film and are also another preoccupation and style of Llinás’ filmmaking.

Needless to say, with its sheer runtime, there are a great many layers, themes, and depths to Life of Jorge Luis Borges. Thanks to its length, it seems on paper to be a film that won’t call for many revisits. But this is what separates Llinás’ work from that of lesser filmmakers. His films are filled to the brim with so much complexity and depth, both intellectual and emotional, that they must be studied and valued through multiple viewings. Life of Jorge Luis Borges firmly establishes Llinás as a director capable of making multiple masterpieces and stands as one of the most tremendous films in recent years.