They All Lie

Fireworks of Art and Craft

With her right hand feeling the leaves of the trees she walks past and her left holding a small recorder that captures her words, Helena seems to be telling us something secret and instrumental to understanding what we will see from that point onwards, all the more so since, at one point, she looks over her shoulder to make sure no one is following her. The sense of this opening shot’s preciousness is heightened by its ending just after the message has been delivered, although a thread of strangeness emerges from the fact that, right there, the ‘strategist’ of They All Lie — the brains behind the seven-petalled machine about to blossom before us — willingly surrenders to the source of the greatest persecution: the past. She accepts the determinism of a family tradition dating back to the time of her great-great-great-grandfather, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an Argentinian writer and intellectual with a traveller’s bent who served as the country’s president from 12 October 1868 to 12 October 1874 (a chronological coincidence the film does not mention, but which fits it like a glove). History, or legend, has it that, from this man onwards, Helena’s family tree grew according to a pattern: whenever a daughter was born, the father died. Perpetuating the lineage thus becomes, like an advance warning, the foretold destiny of the young woman who invites viewers into the house she intends to leave. Before even entering it, and without suspecting it, we are already walking on the lexicon of opposites that paves Matias Piñeiro’s film: past/future, birth/death, reality/fiction, arrival/departure.

Insidiously, as we settle into the house, where the residents who are gradually introduced to us take part in generating new dichotomies, a detective spirit also takes hold of us, something akin to a sense of security that responds instinctively to a feeling of losing our footing, when nothing seems to tally with anything else on the terms of appropriation suggested to us by the title itself — if they all lie, we must discover where the truth is hiding. It is, however, when we become aware of the lie underpinning this model of observation that we catch our first glimpse of truth. And vice versa. As soon as oppositions cease to function as alternatives, we enter the gap from which this film, in another sense, makes sense, echoing Susan Sontag’s wise words: ‘Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.’

The fluid pleasure of navigating They All Lie, when set against the sailor’s knots tied in the narrative and the successive waves of formal asynchrony that buffet it, is its watermark, a proposal for a moral syntax beyond the merely discursive, opening up space to legitimise a view of falsehood as the photographic surface on which the light of truth leaves its imprint. The play of representation in which the characters engage is a mechanism of epistemic reworking which, by rescuing strangeness from familiarity, opens fissures through which new possibilities of desire break free and find room to circulate, allowing us to smile at the flight of a butterfly in which doubt ceases to be the interval between two certainties and becomes the stuff of art.

They All Lie invites us to remain with appearance long enough for the illusion we proverbially associate with it to reveal itself to us as a technology of passage. And it does so in such a way that, on this path of impermanences, we forget that the film’s own path remains unperturbed. Matias Piñeiro, the director, and Helena, the protagonist, even seem like Siamese twins in the cunning of the web they weave. The story within the story in the current of History. A collusion that underlines art’s contemporary tendency towards liminality and — even as it openly evokes (in the title cards introducing each new chapter) filmmakers who gave rise to schools of filmmaking — invites the viewer to de-academicise themselves and take part in the game of understanding the incomprehensible.

An object that emerges from the mist of fairy tales and reminds us that the layer of fantasy of which the functionalisation of life has stripped us still calls to us from afar. In these times when the ground is giving way, suspended between what is dying and what has yet to be born, we need to heed its plea not to decide too quickly what is truth or falsehood, civilisation or barbarism, art or craft. Creating a common space between ‘or’ and ‘and’ re-eroticises our relationship with the world. And it makes it possible for a question mark to reveal itself as the shape of God’s smile.