‘La Flor’ Film Review: Argentine Epic Merits Its 14-Hour Running Time

The first thing to know about “La Flor” is that it’s 14 hours and 28 minutes long. The second is that it more than justifies that intimidating runtime, which is divided into six episodes. Each discrete story unfolds according to the dictates of a different genre, which is to say that Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás’ unique achievement is a B-movie, a musical mystery, a spy thriller, a self-reflexive metafiction, a black-and-white riff on Renoir’s “A Day in the Country,” and a vague dramatization of an 18th-century Englishwoman’s account of being abducted by Native Americans — all at once. The same quartet of actresses (Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes) star in all but one episode, lending the affair much-needed continuity. Llinás himself opens the film to introduce his ambitious project, mapping out the structure on a sheet of paper in a way that explains the title: Four of the stories have a beginning but no end; the fifth, like a short story, has a proper beginning and ending; and the sixth begins in the middle and ends the film. As he illustrates this, you realize he’s drawing a kind of flower — la flor. Also Read: Here's...