Life of Jorge Luis Borges

Few writers of the twentieth century hold a more vaunted position than Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine literary icon capable of inventing entire worlds within the span of mere pages. His was both a life and a body of work full of forking paths, contractions, paradoxes, mistruths, and generative lacunae, and which couldn’t be better suited for a filmmaker as obsessed with stories as his countryman Mariano Llinás ( La Flor, TIFF ’18).

Self-described as “an attempt to narrate Borges' biography through objects and places,” the starting point of the film is a sizeable collection of material overseen by one Ernesto Montequin, who joins Llinás on his quest as a sidekick and sparring partner.

With the erudition and insight of a literary scholar and the gumption of an amateur detective, the filmmaker travels to New York, Texas, Geneva, Reykjavik, and the rural border of Uruguay and Brazil, working through both biographical episodes as well as major texts like “El Aleph,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and “Death and the Compass.” The film simultaneously broadens to consider Borges’ expanded artistic demimonde — which included writers like Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, as well as filmmaker Hugo Santiago — while mapping the writer’s life within Argentina’s political history and in doing so, admirably rises above hagiography to confront Borges’ racism and dalliances with the far right.

Itself deeply Borgesian — full of adventure, curiosity, creativity, and mystery — Life of Jorge Luis Borges is one of the year’s great documentaries that — appropriately — blurs the line between the real and the invented.

ANDRÉA PICARD

  Content advisory: racist language