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

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 urge to interrupt with his latest brainwave. By quoting one critic referencing his previous 13-hour portmanteau from 2018, the director pre-empts any criticism of the almost five-hour work in front of us: “You get the feeling he doesn’t know what to do next, and the solution he’s found is to autodestruct.” But this impish postmodernism quickly darkens in the Triptych’s first part, titled El Equilibrista (The Tightrope Walker); soundtracking Mondongo’s colour classification to bursts of music from Psycho and Vertigo, he seems disturbed by their quest to break down art into its constituent elements. This strand alternates with another in which an art historian attempts to document Mondongo’s process; both are constantly intercut with excerpts of Llinás’s documentary script, him revealing the canvas on which he is daubing his own strokes.

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