‘Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges’ Venice Review: Mariano Llinás Turns a Biography Into an Epic Detective Story

“We do not exist in most of those times; in some, you exist and I do not; in others, I exist and you do not; in others, we both exist. In this one, which a fortunate chance has granted me, you have come to my house; in another, you have found me dead as you crossed the garden; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost.”

“The Garden of Forking Paths,” by Jorge Luis Borges (1941)

The car in which Mariano Llinás travels with his small crew through the city and province of Buenos Aires for much of Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges has a shattered windshield, presumably the result of a stone they encountered somewhere along their many journeys across Argentina. But it does not seem to pose much of a problem for the shoot: the camera films buildings, houses, monuments, streets and roads through that crack as if the strange many-pointed star that has formed there were no impediment at all. In its own way, that spiderweb-like figure reflects the shape of this multifaceted film. At its center is a large impact mark, presumably where the stone struck. That mark is Jorge Luis Borges, the nucleus of this sprawling five-and-a-half-hour account of the Argentine writer that Llinás has made. And radiating outward from that axis are the detours, the paths along which the narrative wanders off and returns, wanders off and returns, again and again. Like the drawings Llinás made to explain how the narrative of La flor worked, the shattered windshield is, surely without intending it, the map that organizes this film, its cartography.

Divided into three episodes, Llinás’s film begins —as so many El Pampero productions do— with a specific commission that gradually turns into something far more ambitious, almost all-encompassing. What began as an assignment to film and catalogue the Fundación ISLAA’s collection, filled with the writer’s historical archives and manuscripts, gradually became, as the director recounts in the rhapsodic voice-over that runs through the film, a biography of Borges —one that, following the playful line of thought characteristic of Llinás, Borges himself may have left behind for him to make. And so the investigation becomes a detective story, with the filmmaker cast as a kind of Watson to the eccentric Sherlock Holmes leading the inquiry: Ernesto Montequín, a researcher, translator and essayist who specializes, among other things, in the life and work of the author of El Aleph.

The mission of uncovering Borges’s secrets in his manuscripts —his marginal notes, his deletions, his letters, postcards and other texts— is the core from which Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges departs and to which it continually returns: the stone that, as Llinás puts it, shattered the glass of world literature. From there, the film develops its radial structure, taking him through the cities Borges visited, the houses where he lived, the places where he worked, the people he knew, the women he loved and the troubles he got himself into. These concentric circles give rise to the characteristic detours of the director of Historias extraordinarias, the digressions through which —as Adolfo Bioy Casares, one of the central figures in Borges’s life, once wrote— life enters the stories. Put another way, this is how Llinás enters the film in his entirety, with all his familiar habits, those that yank a narrative by the nose in ways that are as capricious as they are fascinating.

Of the three, the first episode is the most focused on Borges’s work itself, following certain chronological parameters and revisiting his early writings, his stylistic transformations, his fascination with other writers and some of the most important moments of his life, from his birth through the mid-1940s. It is a mixture of biography, literary analysis and playful interruptions, but above all it is where the detective duo formed by Llinás and Montequín gradually takes shape, plunging deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit of improbable connections, moving back and forth between reality, fiction and play. The biography requires a viewer willing to enter a literary and cinematic code that, one might say, the filmmaker learned from the writer: a place where the real and the fantastic, the banal and the improbable, the epic and the self-referential are combined in unpredictable ways.

The investigation into the physical, real-world places mentioned by Borges in his work leads, in the second episode, to a more inward search. Here, the focus is primarily on his romantic relationships: his girlfriends (real, imaginary or literary), his marital problems, his personal and professional conflicts. The digressions multiply further: love stories in miniature are woven into the film, elusive journeys through Texas are undertaken, Invasión and the figure of Hugo Santiago are given considerable weight, and, in its own peculiar way, the film becomes a strange romantic drama as it recounts the complicated marriage of the author of Emma Zunz to Elsa Astete Millán. Little by little, Llinás abandons the few classical features his film initially seemed to possess and —as he already did in his recent triptych about the Mondongo art collective— pushes everything into a more speculative, personal and anecdotal realm.

The third episode plunges headlong into the elderly Borges, the Borges of controversial political opinions —the film delves deeply into his support for Latin American dictatorships and explores many of his brutal and “politically incorrect” statements from the period— but once again evades the biopic to venture even further into the kind of characteristic behind-the-scenes world so typical of El Pampero Cine’s “documentaries.” Returning to its geographical investigation of various towns in Buenos Aires province, the episode ultimately has more in common with Historias extraordinarias —of which it could almost be a new chapter— than with anything resembling a biography of Borges. Llinás’s sleight of hand thus gradually completes itself, and the investigation returns to the beginning, to the matrix of the film, which may ultimately be more concerned with understanding the connection between the writer and the filmmaker —master and disciple— than with anything else.

Central to the workings of Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges is the peculiar duo formed by Llinás and Montequín, who at times become a comic pair straight out of a classic buddy movie, particularly when they emerge from that clinical New York room where they devote themselves to deciphering Borges’s sometimes unfathomable handwriting. As if they were characters in one of the adventure novels that inspired the Argentine author, the detective duo (magnifying glass and all) moves across a map that occupies the entire territory of the film, much like the map in one of the stories (“On Exactitude in Science”) quoted here. Llinás thus travels through Switzerland, Iceland, Chile, China, Uruguay, the United States and Spain —I am probably forgetting a country or two— always finding some Borgesian excuse to include each of these journeys in the film, whether or not there is any real reason for making them. What does not exist is invented. Or perhaps it was already invented long ago and was merely waiting to reveal itself to the person destined to tell it.

Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges contains moments worthy of an anthology of the absurd, such as the sports journalist who insists on finding out what the writer thinks of Guillermo Vilas —an interview performed by Llinás and his partner, actress Laura Paredes— or the reading of texts written by a lawyer enumerating the legal and intimate reasons that would justify his separation from Elsa. There are also harsher, more abrasive moments, in which Borges expresses his support for Pinochet and, at least initially, for Videla. But behind the gags, the self-reference and the film’s creative, chaotic attempt to scatter the writer’s world until it fills the entire frame, one senses the essence of a lonely and wounded man (“Beatriz, Beatriz Elena, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, beloved Beatriz, Beatriz lost forever, it is I, it is Borges”) who was searching for a moment, however fleeting, of something resembling happiness. And this irreverent biography, in its most generous gesture, gives him one. Therein lies its greatness.