Life of Jorge Luis Borges: a labyrinthian voyage through the work of Argentina’s best known writer

• Reviewed from the 2026 BFI London Film Festival 

One might expect a 323-minute documentary with the title ‘Life of Jorge Luis Borges’ to a be a comprehensive, highly detailed portrait of its subject. But director Mariano Llínas (best known for his 14-hour drama La Flor) is determined instead to make it playfully conform (or perhaps disconform) to that ultimate Borgesian motif, the labyrinth – but one constructed as much of the byways of filmmaking as it is by following Argentina’s most illustrious writer.

The world best knows Jorge Luis Borges as the author of exquisitely written mysterious short prose works of high imagination and puzzling precepts, such as The Garden of Forking Path and Death and the Compass, a kind particularly found in two collections, Fictions (1944) and The Aleph (1949). But Llínas wants us to follow his own Borges (who may not be yours) suggesting that clues planted in Borges’s texts are leading him on. Both a taunt and a come-on to aficionados of the writer’s work, the film wants literally to be marginal, poring as it does lasciviously over the pages of his books, magnifying, underlining and bending words. It wants to test our devotion to the long dead author perhaps to destruction, wants to show how marvellously inventive a small team of filmmakers and archivists can be with no moving images of the subject’s physical presence to draw on and varying levels of access to places that mattered to him – in Switzerland, the USA, Chile and Uruguay, not just Argentina.

Llínas does this through overlapping structural ideas: an investigative mystery in which he jokily is Watson and Ernesto Montequín – the archivist of the Borges collection that’s paying for the filming, who resembles a slimmed-down Roland Barthes – is Sherlock Holmes, going item by item through the precious manuscripts, starting by exploding the myth that Borges drew tigers as a child – no, they were drawn by his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares. There’s a psychogeographic go at chronology where Borges’s age is flashed up whenever they’re present at a key location in Borges’s life. There’s eerie music from composer Gabriel Chwojnik, often figures of seven notes, to trigger never-satisfied suspense. The film takes tangential approaches to awkward aspects of Borges’s personality. A slide-show-like skim takes us through still images of the many women Borges pursued, mostly unsuccessfully. We watch actress Milva Leonardi’s near-blank responses as she listens on headphones to Llínas’s theories of Borges’s thwarted sex-life. Somewhat left as a side note is a retread by Llínas and actress Laura Paredes (Llínas’s wife) of Borges’s horribly racist remarks in old age to a magazine.

Eventually you notice that, following the alphabet, there are 26 chapters to the film overall. Borges is regarded throughout as a writer of consistent and constant genius whereas the works he’s best known for were done before 1956, a transitional year that saw him go from partially to totally blind and also become the Director of the National Library. Llínas, perhaps wisely, ignores Borges’s efforts, for the rest of his life, to downplay those prose works in favour of his poetry. That doesn’t take away the massive impact those key stories had on world literature, being both postmodern and magic realist avant la lettre.

This film’s relationship to Borges’s work mirrors its director’s allergy to formal shots. Llínas mocks his own attempts to pull focus within a car from a book’s cover to a relevant building so that the colour of the book remains, infusing the image. There’s an awful lot of reframing and focusing on building exteriors shot from inside cars, even with a damaged windscreen.

Borges’s own relation to film – famous works made from his stories and things like the moment in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance [1970] where the track of the bullet that enters Mick Jagger’s skull ends on a portrait of Borges – are deemed moot. Instead, this portrait’s love for its own medium comes through in an adumbrated eulogy written by Montequín to his friend and mentor novelist and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky (best know for One Man’s War, 1982) and in ghostly appearances of Llínas’s own mentor, Hugo Santiago (the director of Invasion, 1969, and The Others, 1974, both of which were written with Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares).

The paradoxical point is you have to be deeply interested in Borges to last these nearly always breezy and charming sideways conceits. That’s because we are meant to have a constantly changing relationship to what we are watching as the film dances its playful milonga on the fine border between wry, fascinated engagement and fatigue.