The Triptych of Mondongo, Part 2: Portrait of Mondongo. 2024. Argentina. Directed by Mariano Llinás. North American premiere. In Spanish; English subtitles. 124 min.
From the great fabulist Mariano Llinás, the Argentine writer-director-producer-actor who brought us a pair of heroically ambitious mashups of popular movie and literary genres in Extraordinary Stories (2008) and La Flor (2018), comes this equally sly, inventive experiment in epistemological uncertainty. It is a trilogy of films about creativity, friendship, power, kitsch, mythmaking, portraiture, failure, delusion, egos, and alter-egos. ArtHaus Central in Buenos Aires invited Llinás to make about film about Mondongo, an iconoclastic Argentine art collective named after a colonial-era tripe stew, to document their creation of a baptistry out of colorful plasticine (in The Tightrope Walker), Llinás grows restless, and the collaboration begins to go off the rails as he tries to beat the artists at their own game (in Portrait of Mondongo), taking Johannes Itten’s seminal study of color theory from 1961, the source of Mondongo’s work Baptisterio de los colores, as the inspiration for his own poetic and comedic flights of fancy (in Kunst der Farbe).