La flor (Mariano Llinas, 2019)*
Self-indulgence, the movie.
Part 1: Fine mise en bouche, amateurish at times but the quartet is commited, especially Paredes who will turn out to be the MVP of the whole thing.
Part 2: The best one, though I could have done without the whole scorpion business. It's fun, but Part 3 has that energy in spades, so I was really much more interested in the part about the singer, which is just great, could have (should have ?) been its own movie.
Part 3: So insanely long that I still can't tell what I think about it, which is really true of the whole thing. Some parts are pretty brilliant, and I definitely enjoy the structure of it all, but it also exposes the weaker parts of the quartet (Carricajo in particular), though I did enjoy the mix of Tintin with 70s paranoia aesthetically. Also, whenever people were speaking French, the acting instantly got much dicier (save maybe Paredes who remained my shining light through all of this). It's just too damn long.
Part 4: Probably the part that justifies the whole enterprise existing as it does. Pretty fascinating, though I didn't relish the turn to the supernatural as much as Llinas obviously did.
Part 5: What is this even doing here ? I guess having seen Partie de campagne might have helped, but ugh.
Part 6: Very appropriate conclusion, beautiful.
The credits: Fine.
*In case you don't know what this is, well... it's a 14 hour movie (including a good 30 minutes or so of credits), divided in six episodes. In France it was shown in four parts, every one over 3 hours long, which is apparently not the intended way to watch it, and from what I heard the way it was shown in festivals was much, much smarter (3 parts with intermissions). The different episodes are united by four actresses (except for the fifth one) and a general tendency towards the vague supernatural (except for... the fifth one).
Would you compare it to something like Heimat?
Maybe I would if I had seen Heimat.
I will say this: this is very much a movie to me, not a mini-series. It has episodes, but they're unequal in length and I think the official way it was presented in festivals is the best way to watch it. That's in 3 parts, with intermissions in the middle, the first part being comprised of episodes 1 & 2 (3h30 total I think), the second part being just episode 3 (between 5 and 6 hours, maybe multiple intermissions in that one) and the last part being the last 3 episodes plus credits (so around 5 hours ?). Like I don't think watching it episode by episode works particularly well because they vary so much in length: episodes 5 and 6 are maybe half an hour each, tops, while episode 3 is over 5 hours.
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