A 323-Minute Borges Documentary Casts Its Director as Watson
The documentary Life of Jorge Luis Borges runs 323 minutes, long enough to raise the expectation of a comprehensive portrait. BFI's review says director Mariano Llínas, best known for the 14-hour drama La Flor, instead shapes it as a labyrinth built as much from filmmaking byways as from following Borges.
The review describes an investigative game: Llínas jokily plays Watson to archivist Ernesto Montequín's Sherlock Holmes as they go item by item through the precious manuscripts. It starts by exploding the myth that Borges drew tigers as a child; the drawings were by his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares.
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There is a pleasing irony in the Borges collection paying for the filming and its archivist being cast as Sherlock Holmes. The money and the mystery come from the same room.
The harder fact may be absence: no moving images of Borges to draw on, and only varying access to the places that mattered to him in Switzerland, the USA, Chile and Uruguay, not just Argentina. Inventiveness looks less like a flourish than the only honest way to make the film.