Dante no es únicamente severo

If Far From the Trees (1972) is the Barcelona School of Film’s documentary manifesto, Dante no es únicamente severo is its fiction complement. And fiction is what this film is all about: a fashionable Scheherazade straight from the pages of an unfinished pop-nouveau-roman epic relates stories that don’t necessarily have an end or a point, stories of ever-varying fabric and temper, stories that detour serpentinely into somewhere fascinating, stories that end on an utterly nonsensical but charming note – the way every good story has a goddamn right to end, suggesting how the world should be and not how it is (yes, there’s a Stone-Eater!).
Sounds weirder than it is. And it does add up. Think Miguel de Cervantes and Jan Count Potocki, maybe Lewis Carroll, definitely Roberto Bolaño. As a title card toward the end puts it: “Except for trains, anything, including births, can be ahead of time.” Even films, like this baby.