Raoul Ruiz
A Chilean living in exile in France since the fascist coup. His cinematic career is long and not only prolific but diverse, with many different periods, always changing and experimenting, finding new ground, styles and topics to cover. In the beginning he made Chilean neo-realist dramas with increasingly Godardesque cinematic experimentation, on topics covering Chilean society, culture and politics, with some abstract, didactic or satirical excursions and slight touches of absurdism.
In France, he soon dived into intellectual abstraction and formalism, using structure and every aspect of film to explore his thoughts and ideas. He is a self-proclaimed 'imaginist', constructing a reality according to the intellectual themes being explored, sometimes wandering into magical-realism territory. His work is not necessarily surrealistic where irrational or subconscious images are used to explore a subject, but a place where rationalism and imagination overcome reality. He abandons narrative often, following an idea or whim through visual flights of fancy, injecting absurdities, sacrificing realism for imagination, and plot for odd little detours, storytelling and tall tales. His most consistent and long-lasting approach, however, is to experiment with cinematic structure, cinematography and dialogue, playing with cinematic conventions, resulting often in formalist movies for cineasts to analyze in addition to covering intellectual themes for the rest of us, with an occasional dry Bunuelian sense of humor. This highly experimental period lasted from the late 70s until the late 90s and produced most of the movies reviewed here.
During the early French period he also made a profilic series of shorts and documentaries, many of them playful and wildly experimental (including one where France becomes a deterministic board-game). His movies from this period were often based on an artistic whim, theme or curiosity, writing it up in days and shooting it quickly as an experiment. There are many impossible to find obscure releases from this period. He gradually increased the humor and became more playful with his creations in the late 80s and 90s and finally, in the late 90s, became much more accessible, employing narratives (sometimes even linear ones) but often with challenging dialogue and themes, and fantastical plots that slightly tweak reality. His latest movies use advanced cinematography techniques to blend different times, places and ideas together, exploring a narrative through structural experiments. For example, in Time Regained, he explores Prousts last book of a series through a kaleidoscopic hodgepodge of memories, and in Klimt he creates a biopic exploring the deterioriating mind of an artist with snippets of intellectual debates on art, and imaginary muses, allegories or representatives of society appearing as real people in his life.
A very dense, artistic, poetic and beautifully filmed masterwork. At the surface, this is a bizarre narrative about the meeting between a murderer and a sailor and the exchange of wondrous and strange life-stories. In this strange world, a sailor has a doppelganger, prostitutes line up and state their possible flaws, there's a girl called 'by-the-way', a man writes home to his mom about the slaps he got on Christmas, a shy, insecure, virginal prostitute keeps her possessions in a coffin, a man smokes cigarettes in a pipe so that they won't get stolen, a ship sinks only when the seas are very calm, sailors identify themselves by their letter tattoos, muggers recite poetry, men produce worms and butterflies through sores instead of defecating, and so on. Even the dialogue is strange. An example: "Can you lend me some money?" "How much?" "Less than what you have." "That's too much.". There are many interpretations of this obviously symbolic movie, each more obscure than the rest, but for me this is about people alive and dead. They are dead because they are only living other people's lives and stories, they can't defecate because they aren't really absorbing and using the 'food', and a man's essence is transferred through the generations, thus 'dying' so that others may 'live', like a lineage of vampires. In this abstract world, people are interchangeable as long as they belong to the same letter tattoo, father figures are killed for their stories, the crowns represent the currency of exchange, identical stories and passions are shared between sailors, and even nudity is an artificial construct exposed when the artistic nude removes her nipples and pubic hair. Ruiz explores mechanical relationships, family, love, sex, religion, liars, commercialism, knowledge, and desires all within this context, and repeated viewings keep realigning the pieces of the puzzle in new ways.
This marks the beginning of Ruiz's relatively more accessible period where he also used more notable celebrities. Four short stories interwine and flirt with each other, the fourth twisting them all together into a braid. The theme is identity, the strands that tie separate people together or that separate multiple aspects of the same person. Ruiz has fun with this, casting Mastroianni in four roles, playing word games with names, using little details to play with this theme like showing a man who makes the same money begging as he did as a professor, showing a mirror image that is doing different things, telling a story of a man who tries to resume his marriage by switching roles with her current husband, etc. Characters are taken to amusing extremes, a sweet couple sleeps with anyone who asks them nicely but their naivete repels swingers, some people blend into the patterns on the wallpaper, and one man thinks fairies has stolen 20 years of his life. Both an anthology of strangely amusing stories, and a metaphysically strange art movie that serves as a contrast to Lynch's Lost Highway. Not a masterpiece, but fascinating on many levels.
Perhaps Ruiz's only film that truly feels surreal, because he seems to be purposely exploring the irrational and the imagination and how it affects reality and perspective, causing delusion, hysteria or madness, and related subjects like controlling relationships, hypnotism, dreams, the projection of desires onto objects, etc. This plotless, confusing, bizarre movie with nonsensical dialogue revolves around an unbalanced woman who works for a family on an island, her flippant, wandering relationships with different men of different ages and roles, her fantasies, delusions and fears, during which people die or kill themselves mysteriously in almost supernatural ways, desires become reality, and identity shifts, sometimes between imaginary people. From another angle, this is Ruiz exploring the melodrama of the mind, the gothic horrors and mystical symbols we see in the ordinary, the romance we superimpose onto violent deaths. A child kills his family, but in this movie he is a ghost, a symbol, he kills due to abuse or various Freudian needs and desires, etc. She tells her romanticized life-stories and gets upset when her audience read newspapers instead of listening. Men want to die, over and over, come back for revenge, uncover fates that usually involve death, are possessed, possess others, or appear in different guises. An island is constantly and mysteriously alluded to in lipstick, prophecies and blood. Bizarre visuals include levitating balls, paper boats in a man's blood, a head in a suitcase full of food, a man throwing a skull containing flowers to copies of himself, and a murderous child. The camera frequently makes objects look absurdly huge, playing with perspective and our eyes. Finally, in addition to this interpretation, there are the many typically obscure references and allusions by Ruiz for the intellectually inclined that enjoy pointing out the pointless references.
Perhaps a companion piece to City of Pirates and almost as incomprehensible. Whereas the latter movie explored the imagination, this one revels in fantasy, the unnatural, the miracle, and the irrational. A scientific advisor on the topic of miracles goes to visit a village where miracles and strange phenomena have replaced normal life. In this place, art, books, paintings, horror stories, fantasies, religious imagery, etc have all possessed, snatched, conquered and impregnated reality and people's minds. Unfortunately, the screenplay never seems to progress beyond this concept and the movie then gets lost in one bizarre vignette after another: A cemetery of crutches (presumably where thousands have been cured), zombie-like villagers, a Virgin Mary apparition that mimics everything she sees, a bizarre work of art that spouts cobwebs and possesses the viewer, a floating man is led on a leash, a boy who must get permission to perform miracles, a strange experiment involving copulation in a lab and reincarnation inside a Marquis's body, a doctor studying the Marquis's split personality by having him masturbate, a man who buries people alive as a joke, etc. Intriguing or amusing at times, but mostly infuriatingly confusing and random.
A landmark short from Ruiz that started his more abstract and artsy period of film-making in France. Vicious barking dogs in territorial streets combined with flashing, static La Jetée-esque images of a woman's melodramatic and circular life convey a feeling of life led by mechanical fate and primitive instincts. Words and behaviour no more meaningful than those of a dog as the woman is harrassed as a child, discovers a dark, violent secret about her true parents, leads a sordid life, which then erupts in violence, closing the cirle. Images and words are repeated formally, the concept of predefined roles played with as a woman assumes the role of a man, etc.
An overrated intellectual mockumentary which has been compared to Greenaway. Six mysterious paintings and one allegedly stolen one are analyzed by a collector and an interjecting narrator. Theories, conjectures and forced allusions based on fictional minutiae suggest different explanations as to why the paintings once caused a scandal, and the collector keeps eerie recreations of the paintings using live people so he can explore them in 3d and adjust the visuals on demand. A little joke on the world of art, and a moderately interesting exploration of how we perceive images, and what paintings can convey through us.
Two insomniacs meet, a voyeur professor and a boxer, they both discuss the loss of life through sleep, suicide, and the ability to make anything happen through dreams. They feel they can grow in power together and spy on, oversee, manipulate or control the normal people who sleep. The movie then starts to lose its grip on reality along with them, as they embark on a series of actions and adventures involving the rape of a pregnant woman, and bizarre dreams, human mutations and ghosts, as they attempt to use their powers on various people, lovers, or drowned people. Sometimes the movie seems to be exploring themes of consciousness and identity, how we perceive reality, what part of us exists in this world, and possible states of being while living, sleeping or after death. Possible connections with other people are explored, love reduced to absurdities, links to spirits, superficial links to live people, rape, psychology, solipsism. But the movie is so lost in bizarre word-plays and confusing scenes of otherworldly human interaction that it is mostly baffling.
Ruiz explores memories, the experience of life as a series of interconnected images, facts, and history through the metaphor of cinema. With multiple intertwined layers, Ruiz builds a movie that behaves like mnemonic associations. A revolutionary who once memorized the names of 1500 people by associating them with lines from the play 'Life is a Dream', realizes he forgot the play, goes to the cinema to try to recall memories, sees the same movie he saw 20 years ago, experiences temporary amnesia, etc. The movies he watches blend with reality, the cinema becomes a backdoor to a police station, the toilet leads to a party, characters from the movies appear in several places, sounds bleed into the cinema, the cinema keeps changing into various things as people walk through, play, or exchange ideas, the cinema is compared to a church, special glasses allow people to see nudity only without nipples because they are 'censored' by a man who dislikes nipples, etc. etc. A difficult and dense abstract creation (with some playful scenes and dialogue) that doesn't behave like any other movie. Only sporadically interesting however, and it spends a lot of time in quotes and scenes from the actual play.
Nine stories including a priest who lost his faith, a thief and a magic mirror, a search for a pirate treasure, reality-hopping, lost lovers, and a web site that predicts a person's actions, are combined in various ways as a playful exercise. For starters, combinations are made using the same actors, traits, costumes, and keywords, then by interchanging the time periods, characters and background sounds, but most of all there are the shared objects, symbols, discussions, themes and concepts that get twisted around and played with as they move between stories. Stories intertwine through projections through magic mirrors that are stolen but that also cause theft, dreams of two people that conjoin through time and space, a similarity of faces leads to more connections, paintings that hide secrets that paint paintings that fall in love with people that were captured by paintings, and a name like Socrates becomes a ghost in one story, a discussion in another, and then a joke in an absurd story about ships named Socrates that sink. In addition, everything is made absurd, fantastical, nonsensical. Philosophical ideas are reversed with sophistry just for the hell of it, explanatory theories and mechanisms make use of other elements from another story just to achieve more combinations, etc. A magical stone is claimed to stop earthquakes but the customer retorts that he likes earthquakes, a pirate kills the poor because he doesn't want them to starve, and there are the endless bizarre and alienating absurdities such as a 'female coffin' that produces food while a dead man inside it eats. There are frequent recurring themes of predestination and freedom, as if the movie were trying to break free by breaking all conventions and ways of thinking while still following its own associative rules. An extremely dense movie with references to many other Ruiz movies, almost like a compact summary of his work. Somehow it manages to be chaotic, rebellious and freeform while still adhering to rules. Unfortunately all this only makes it sound like a masterpiece and the actual result is too chaotic and whimsical, its density is probably also its undoing as there doesn't seem to be a focus, a single theme or thread to carry through this pseudo-structured madness and intellectual masturbation. Probably surpasses Dark at Noon in terms of freeform unapproachability and is much more interestingly playful than clever.
Like Treasure Island, this is a children's movie for adults, this time presented as a TV Series in three parts. Ruiz explores a child's mind, life, responsibilities, fears, interests, etc through the imagination and a series of fantastical or odd scenes. The first episode is by far the most coherent and interesting, Ruiz exploring time-travel and a Groundhog Day loop as the child finds himself in a time-loop trying to correct mistakes and save his family's lives. Specific objects and events such as jewels, a thief, his teacher, a series of questions, a strange old sailor and his half-man-half-dog become critical in this loop. Instead of closing circles of time however, Ruiz keeps shifting them sideways in a game of chance in an interesting structure of neverending looping circles. The other two episodes just seem to wander from one imaginative oddity to the next: His class try to dream something into existence, switching bodies with an adult, magical coins, cards, violent children's games, a child chess prodigy, flying, pirates, hand-shadow games, peering through a keyhole only to get pulled through it, child love, a sailor who is a doll, etc, all with some random references to the first episode.
A puzzling, strange and playful exercise by Ruiz that is at times a throwback to his earlier experimental period but is still pre-occupied with memory. A gambler wins a mansion, taking his ailing wife there for rest and recuperation. He finds many odd occupants that may not even be alive. Ruiz mixes ghost story b-movies, mystery and black comedy here, dropping repetitive clues and visual cross-references that jumble all of the occupants' stories together, with links that may or may not be superficial. Blood appears on one woman's towel then on another's forehead which may or may not have a connection, ghosts sometimes appear visually and other times are only heard, some of the ghosts may or may not have been related, there are strange absurd rules like languages and religions that are confined to specific parts of the house, horror appears in the form of blood and skeletal limbs, but these soon become absurd as a bone is played as a flute, etc. Most of the movie consists of Ruiz toying with ghostly games, breaking the rules of ghost stories with whimsical imagination and comedy. At another level, the feeling of morbidity, trapped situations, absurdity, confusion with time and non-linear logic reflect the man's mind who is telling his own tale through a kaleidoscope of memories. At yet another level, this movie is told by a writer sharing his experiences and memories that may or may not be true, creating his own reality that conflicts with the version of his life told by fellow customers at a restaurant. In other words, this is pure Ruiz experimentation that is only there for its own sake.
Ruiz's intellectual exercise in the form of an unfilmable, difficult book turned into a movie. The theme involves concepts of dissent, factions, conflict, two flip sides of a coin vs. the whole picture, domination vs. submission, opposites, revolution, debate, doubt, profanity/perversion vs. the sacred and holy, all explored philosophically in the context of religion and politics. Although it contains priests, revolutionaries, nuns and snippets of narrative, this is a very abstract and formal movie, boasting a unique approach of two constrasting movies in one: Two sets of actors in two similar movies, contrasted and sometimes conflicting with each other, always spliced together in the editing room. A movie that is both focused and loose, meaningful and abstruse, provocative and meditative. Not surreal or strange, but very difficult and often confusing.
When Ruiz creates an absurd farce, you just know things will take a turn to the extreme. This one is a linear tale of the insane with outrageously absurd and out-of-control comedy. Livia is an insane new-age woman-poet who somehow becomes the fulcrum of the world, heiress to all kinds of fortunes with a dozen people wanting something from her by hook or by crook. Pointpoirot is an escaped mental-patient-cum-angel-cum-serial-killer with a mission. When the bodies pile up, the police decide to sit in a restaurant and do nothing. Because, you see, this is the best day of her life.
What starts off as an adult-oriented modern retelling of Treasure Island quickly becomes a multilayered, strange creation that can be absorbed in many ways: A coming-of-age drama, a view of the confusing adult world and behaviour through the eyes of a child, a modern retelling of Treasure Island, a metaphysical exploration of a writer creating his own story, a quirky absurd comedy about adults playing games and taking on roles, a grand metaphor for the cyclic predetermined 'games' that all adults adopt and play, including war and violence. Jim is very confused when his world becomes something out of a thriller he sees on TV, adults seem to be playing cruel games with him and with each other, his parents behave confusingly with strange guests that arrive at their hotel, and confusing dreams with moving walls and strange visitors don't help matters. Soon his life is full of intrigue, what looks like suicides, fake deaths, plots, conspiracies, diamonds, brigands, war, and a treasure island as life starts to imitate fiction. Not as challenging or abstruse as other Ruiz movies and it is overlong, but often amusing.
The title refers to a classic book from Persia/Iran which I read just to try to make sense of this movie. That proved to be only remotely helpful. The book creates a world of a man's stream of consciousness who is possibly dreaming, or seeing opium-induced visions that take him through time, his memories, his parents, his bad relationship with his wife, etc. with strange or symbolic imagery, shifting identities and recurring details as in dream-logic. This would have made a good Ruiz movie without changes, but Ruiz, as usual, only uses it a starting point and mixes it with elements of another play, relocates some key scenes into a cinema/movie, and reinterprets the surrealism of the book through flashes of personal impressions, variations and abstractions. As you can imagine, the result is ultimately difficult and mostly an impenetrable mess. Like the book, the movie drifts between segments, dreams, scenes from another movie/life/time, all somehow connected through the protagonist. The only suggested themes I could extract from the movie are those of human relationships, tradition, death, bits and pieces of ourselves that we derive from these, identity, and the intensely personal, emotional and very irrational behaviour that goes along with all this. Also, due to the book, the movie is very heavy on the Arabic costumes, themes and traditions. A woman love-obsession is cut into pieces and carried on his back as he travels, decapitated heads are kept on display to demonstrate a man's ideals, people look for the uncle, a twin, his friend wearing a balaclava pulls strips of flesh from his wounds, a skull talks to him, and there are many displays of insane emotion, religious expression, lust and bizzare behaviour. The narrator makes poetic statements as he shares these personal shifting identities, locations and times with us, sometimes giving the impression that we are watching younger or older versions of himself in different worlds. All of this doesn't really come together though, and in the end, this is just too impenetrable and bizarre.
Features a surprisingly conventional narrative about a lawyer who adopts hopeless cases and defends an alleged murderer who had a strange relationship with his aunt (the victim). The lawyer gets conflicting versions of what happened from different people involved in the boy's life, and tries to make sense of their stories through their various eccentricities. But as this is a Ruiz movie, this becomes a backdrop for Ruiz's experimental intellectualism and sense of humor. Madness and predestiny are the themes, exploring whether we control any aspect of our lives through the various little madnesses in our minds. But this experiment didn't quite come together for me, often feeling out of control or devoid of focus. Colorful characters include an aggressive shrink with a disorder that disallows face-recognition, and a man who drops cultural names every other word, claiming that everyone's psyche is made up of books, fictional characters and art. Motives, psyches, characters and profiles frustratingly change hands every other scene in a mad Robbe-Grillet-esque puzzle that confuses more than it reveals. A strange psychotherapy technique is shown involving the recreation of a painting, and death comes due to destiny, nonsensical motives, or from the hands of a ghost out for revenge. A mess.
A tiresome one-note Bunuel-like joke movie that explores the conventions of soap opera, old, cheesy, violent TV shows, and Mexican melodrama. The protagonist lives in a world where a stranger who stabbed himself follows him around with a knife in his stomach while killing everyone he meets as a form of communication, people break out in melodramatic back-stories and soliloquies, strangers turn out to be related or cheating or in a love triangle, people he meets in toilets or restaurants break out in violence or turn out to be involved in cliched, nonsensical conspiracies, soap actors drone about their loves or life dramas, etc. This is also a world where whisky bottles appear out of nowhere, women are hypnotized by mistake and made to pose for sketches, men lie on the floor talking while geysers of blood pour out of them, and raindrops turn into coins. Absurd, bizarre, sometimes amusing, but mostly wears thin after a few minutes.
Wildly experimental film that seems to be exploring the very basics of sociology, anthropology, linguistics, culture and general human interaction. Or it may be just an obscure metaphor for Ruiz's typical political interests. A group of linguists and anthropologists with wife and kid recluse themselves in a strange house with the last two survivors of a tribe that communicates using only 60 words. A very disjointed, difficult, explorative movie follows with many random snippets of dialogue, nonsensical monologues, absurd stories, interaction that becomes melodramatic for no reason, sudden bursts of dramatic music, the collection of words, strange body gestures, fantasy mythology and masturbatory cultural intellectualism, the random use of five languages, facial expressions, a telepath cutting off his tongue, etc. all spliced together in a jumble as if Ruiz were exploring humanity by overturning everything he knows at it. Also at times an attack on cultural rape through colonialism. An intellectual experiment, but an uninteresting, unrewarding one.
Based on a surreal book which was based on a real dream telling the absurd, dreamlike and confusing adventures of a man with a severe identity crisis. He is constantly being accused of things like littering, indecent exposure and plagiarism, and people think he is someone else even though he feels he is a famous lecturing professor. Ruiz uses this as a backdrop for another of his super-quick medium-length experiments, only this one gets butchered to service more practical goals of his at the time: Ruiz wanted to use this to teach acting students so he took this story apart into an awkward sequence of dramatic meandering scenes with absurd location-shifting and artistic camera placement, then quickly and constantly replaced all of the characters in the movie with different actors, sometimes even in the middle of a sentence.
A series of TV shorts covering a translation of Dante's Inferno. The first eight were covered by Greenaway in his typical multimedia style with superimposed images, sound and information. The next six, in a much more obscure release alternatively titled "Diablo Chile", were converted into an experimental political pseudo-joke. Ruiz juxtaposes a reading of the Inferno with largely irrelevant footage of Chile's Santiago and random 'hellish' imagery as an experimental, one-joke statement on Chile being hell. Chileans chase Dante and Virgil with crosses, people, clothing and objects burst into flame, some Chilean citizens are hung upside down from a ceiling, a handful of gory bits are thrown in with dismembered limbs, flags pinned into brains, facial mutations, nasty cooking recipes, etc. It never goes beyond this joke however and it all feels rather lost and weak.