The Triptych of Mondongo review – one part art documentary, two parts directorial megalomania

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What begins as a portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo snowballs into Mariano Llinás’s infuriatingly brilliant farrago of colour, conflict and existential crisis About as inside-baseball for visual arts as you can get, Mariano Llinás’s three-part portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo is knackering, infuriating and, infuriatingly, often brilliant – especially in its more sincere second instalment. The film nominally tries to document Mondongo’s 2021 Baptistery of Colours project , in which the artists catalogued the chromatic spectrum with plasticine blocks inside a dodecahedron chapel. But it quickly snowballs into Llinás’s own scattershot inquiry into colour and portraiture, a tone poem that ceaselessly interrogates its own tones, a crisis of faith about representation, and – as he falls out with artists Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha – a droll depiction of a director’s nervous breakdown. As Laffitte lets fly at him at one point, Llinás can never resist the...
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Tornado review – windswept samurai western set in apocalyptic Scotland

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The second feature from John Maclean is an almost surreal tale of itinerant martial arts performers and a band of thieves in 18th-century Scotland

John Maclean’s new movie is a dour, pessimistic, almost surrealistically downbeat revenge western set in Scotland in the late 18th century – but it could as well be happening in some post-apocalyptic landscape of the distant future or on another planet. This is the follow-up to his debut Slow West, and as with that film it is shot by Robbie Ryan with music by Jed Kurzel (director Justin’s brother and collaborator). I have to admit, though, that this does not quite have the energy or the fluency of that previous film, perhaps not the same production resources either – and by comparison it is more strenuously contrived. Yet the pure strangeness of the movie commands attention and there is a charismatic lead performance by Japanese actor-musician Mitsuki Kimura, or Kôki.

She plays a dancer called Tornado, who travels around what looks like utterly empty terrain with her impresario father Fujin (Takehiro Hira) in a covered wagon, putting on a samurai show. They perform with puppets, whose little lopped-off heads and limbs squirt out fake blood with tiny ingenious pumps; they also demonstrate samurai sword-twirling combat themselves. They appear to have once been part of a travelling circus encamped elsewhere. And who do they perform to? A crowd of people show up out of nowhere, having presumably walked many miles from the (unseen) villages where they live.

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