Cortázar

A profile of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, encompassing his boxing career, literary work, political radicalism, and personal (and cultural) exile in Europe, interspersed with self-penned tangos and various grandiloquent musings on subjects to hand. The film is a montage (Cortázar's own tape recordings, readings from his writings, archive television interviews, filmed reconstructions) shorn of any outside narration. It's a disjointed technique, but one which, given patience, achieves a rare meditative quality that helps to temper some of the film's more drily intellectual aspects. As do the tangos. Even so, its appeal is likely to be confined to those with a prior interest in the man and his work.