Mondongo and his three-part cinematic portrait

Between March and May, Arthaus Cine screened El tríptico de Mondongo , the latest work by director Mariano Llinás . Three films that revolve around a common theme: the work of the artistic duo Mondongo (Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha), the unique relationship they have with the director, and an uncomfortable, playful, yet melancholic look at the contemporary art world. They also explore friendship, money, and fiction.

These films began shooting in 2021 when the artistic space Arthaus commissioned the director to make a documentary about the artistic group, which had a long friendship with Llinás. Four years later, the result was twofold: on the one hand, the aforementioned Triptych , and on the other, the presumed end of that friendship. Presumed because, although the director himself stated this in interviews and hinted at it in the films, the viewer cannot fully grasp the quarrel after seeing how reality and fiction incessantly blend together throughout the 287 minutes that make up these three films.

What is the true contribution of this triptych? Is it a reflection on art, color theory, and the role of the artist in contemporary society? A meditation on money, hypocrisy, and how an artist can become entangled in a superficial and snobbish underworld? Is it a meditation on the difficulty of making a portrait and how it always ends up becoming a self-portrait? Or is it, rather, all of these combined?

The first installment is the most conventional. Llinás records—at times almost like an invisible narrator—the making of the Baptistery of Colors, a work by Mondongo inspired by Johannes Itten's color theory. The Mondongos also speak with a researcher from Conicet (National Council of Cultures) who analyzes their own materials and production processes, which adds significant value to the documentary for the study of the visual arts.

The documentary observational device is quickly contaminated by the author's own methods: the backstage, the scriptwriting, the literal transcription of conversations turned into scenes and vice versa. Llinás blurs, as in his best moments, the boundaries between reality and fiction. A question, which will be taken up again in the second part, also emerges: to what extent does the mere presence of a camera transform any documentary record into fiction?

The director's own criticism also begins to surface with the recording of Llinás himself writing a poem on his computer during the final minutes—something that also slows down and makes the film's pace somewhat monotonous: Are the Mondongos progressive bourgeois playing at provocation? Superficial creators disguised as cursed artists? Llinás doesn't answer, but leaves the doubt hanging in the air.

The second part stretches the boundaries between reality and fiction to the extreme. Here we see, in an intimate way, how the friendship between the director and the artists begins to fray. Llinás proposes a challenge: he too will create, just as the artistic duo did with their Baptistery, an artistic work based on his interpretation of Itten's color theory. He proposes this under the structure of a duel and camouflaged among dialogues he asks Juliana and Manuel to interpret. The discomfort, present in the first film, increases.

The conflict reaches its climax when we watch a night, one of many captured by the lens of Agustín Mendilaharzu—a cameraman, one of the creators, along with Llinás, of El Pampero Cine, and a personal friend—where Llinás meets with the Mondongos to eat, drink wine, and sing karaoke. At one point, everything gets out of hand, and off-screen, we hear Mendilaharzu apparently punch Llinás. Later, the director appears crying on camera while Juliana yells insults at him. She calls him unbearable. It's the end of their friendship.

Once again, reflections on the boundary between the spontaneous and the constructed, the real and the fictitious, emerge. Does it matter whether Llinás and the Mondongos actually rehearsed this or whether it was a true capture of the unraveling of a long-standing relationship? Does it detract from the artistic value of their work? All of this is interspersed with the director's reflections, based on paintings, on the difficulty of portraying someone. He concludes that every portrait is, at the same time, a self-portrait. This triptych is also proof of this.

New questions float in the air: Is this film a portrait of Mondongo or of Llinás himself? Is he suffering from this assignment or does he enjoy it? Is there honesty in his pain, or is it, rather, an exercise in narcissistic enjoyment, just as he criticized the Mondongos? At one point, he becomes obsessed with a critique from a Letterboxd user who accuses him of the same things he accuses Mondongo of: imposture, pretense, falsehood. The device folds upon itself. The ambiguity is total.

The third part is the most experimental and contemplative. The music by Gabriel Chwojnik—a frequent collaborator in Llinás's universe—is performed by a live orchestra while archival images are displayed and technical explanations about chromatic gradients are unfolded by colorist Inés Duacastella. It is, literally, Itten's color theory through Llinás's lens, as if cinema could be transformed into a pictorial essay. Here, actresses Pilar Gamboa and María Villar join in, and the Mondongo brothers are absent, as they no longer participate except in archival images.

What is the core of the disturbance? Color? Friendship? Fiction? All of these together? In "Lightness," an essay by Colombian art critic and writer Juan Cárdenas recently published by Sigilo, he states: "All great art bears the mark of lightness. No matter how heavy it appears, no matter whether its processes and materials evoke confusion or bulk. Great art always seems to float."

Does Llinás's triptych float? Or does it sink under its own conceptual weight? Is he both judge and judge of the criticism he makes of the Mondongos, suggesting a certain frivolity? What are they seeking: to be popular, revolutionary, or to produce works for a select audience? What is clear is that his exercise in self-awareness, present in almost all of his work, is much more attentive here to exploring its weaknesses.

Itten said in his famous treatise on color that inspired all this: "In art, the most important thing is not the means of representation and expression; much more important is man, with his character and his humanity." Mondongo and Llinás seem to have this clear.