Life of Jorge Luis Borges (Part 3)

From Viennale

How is one to recount Borges’s lunch with the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, his visit to Augusto Pinochet, his disdain for certain aspects of popular life, and the shameful remarks he made in interviews from this same period? Nothing is omitted. Infamy was a decisive theme for Borges, and yet this stain, though it touched his own life, imparted no trace of abjection to his work. Llinás’s decision to have actress Laura Paredes read and gently impersonate the writer during the interviews in question softens the embarrassment of the occasion. Nor is Borges’s abhorrence of the cruelty of executioners left unmentioned: the dictatorship was infamous, and Borges understood as much. What follows is a retrospective montage of photographs; later, the film visits the place where Borges’s parents conceived him. In its farewell, it also bids farewell to Edgardo Cozarinsky, a filmmaker and writer for whom, as for Llinás, Hugo Santiago and so many others, Borges was decisive. The epilogue gives form to the early intuition that permeated the writer’s entire oeuvre: fiction is the secret reverse side of reality, perhaps even its sandy foundation. An extraordinary discovery comes to determine the filmmaker’s destiny. (Roger Koza)