The movie is available for streaming as a whole (4h 5m) or as a miniseries in three parts. Since the running times nearly add up and the parts lack the usual introductory material, it seems it has been split just for the the sake of distribution and the three segments are meant to be seen in one sitting. The film is divided in titled chapters with two very short intermissions and one scene numbered out of sequence.
I am not fond of long movies, among them director Mariano Llinás' later work La Flor (2018). However this film captivated me from the beginning. There are three main stories that don't intersect but take place in the same milieu, that of small-to-medium towns on the great plains of Buenos Aires province (the filming included Tandil, Chascomús and Azul among many other towns). All through the movie a narrator explains (or doesn't) what we see on screen. The feeling is that of listening to a master storyteller that uses a bag of tricks to keep your attention through a long tale. One such trick is teasing you with inessential details about some secondary character. Another, casually throwing a misleading hint (or a whole secondary story) that guides you to a side path leading nowhere. And at times, like a narrator would do, the director/scriptwriter is pulling the viewer's leg. The narration is to the point, witty, frequently funny, full of rich colloquial terms from the Spanish spoken in Argentina. There are inside jokes such as marking the location of a sinister stud farm on a map with a symbol meaning "unsafe, get out fast."
Some features instantly recognizable to every Argentinian are in view. The small town squares with geometrically planted and trimmed trees. The City Hall offices where property and tax records gather dust, its employees managing to navigate the apparent chaos. The Sociedad de Fomento, whose official definition is a "nonprofit civil association aimed at improving housing, infrastructure, alimentation and medical care in its jurisdiction" but also doubling as a social club. The poste restante shelves collecting abandoned letters at local post offices. The epic flooding of the low lying pampas by heavy rain and swollen riivers. The Art Deco/Futurist architecture of Francesco Salamone, who built massive, oversize, towered City Halls for small dusty towns and disquieting entrances to cemeteries and slaughterhouses.
The filming manages a sort of alienation effect where you are often reminded of being just a spectator. Some sequences (like the initial scenes) are seen several times, each time with different information (and narration) so the meaning is different. Other sequences (such as the happening in the grain mill) are filmed including stationary and/or soundless shots approaching the way you would learn about it a newspaper. Cinematography alternates unsteady close ups a la Dogme 95 with long shots where the characters are just specks on the unlimited plains. The soundtrack includes inventive use of noises (sometimes exaggerated, occasionally omitted) with scoring of action scenes bringing to mind Morricone's music for Sergio Leone. All in all the movie is a success where, as in real life stories don't have a neat ending (or we don't get to know it) and we are often distracted and/or misled by digressions.
