Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz, 2010).
Flicking through my notes on my way home from Vienna, I stumbled on a quote whose source I couldn’t quite locate: I have a long story to tell you, and I have never told it to anyone. I knew the words belonged to one of the Raúl Ruiz films I’d binged in town, courtesy of a stellar retrospective held at this year’s Viennale. But I couldn’t recall which. Sounds and images from a week’s worth of journeys into the Chilean filmmaker’s oeuvre had coalesced into a shapeshifting amalgam that made my own recollections hazy, and the films themselves porous. Was this one of the stories that Marcello Mastroianni saunters into in Three Lives and Only One Death (1996)? Did the words ricochet in Love Torn in a Dream (2000), where nine storylines combine to spawn a myriad of others? Or was it one of the anecdotes relayed in Dialogues of Exiles (1974), a portrait of the Chileans who had, like Ruiz, fled their home after Pinochet’s coup?
That I couldn’t pinpoint the right title was because the line could have realistically fit into any of them—because, quite simply, every Ruiz film is made of stories. I do not mean this in any colloquial way. Like Jacques Rivette, a director often invoked in conversations about his cinema, Ruiz thought fiction held a special power, and reducing him to a mere storyteller is to misunderstand that force as well as his artistry. To watch a Ruiz film is to witness the simultaneous unfurling of countless others, for each eventually splinters into a thousand narrative shards, opening up cinematic possibilities beyond the chronicling of a cogent, linear story. Every story and every anecdote triggers another, “in a sort of arborescent proliferating structure,” as Christine Buci-Glucksmann so evocatively described it, “which respects no chronology, no dramatization of the action, no Euclidean space.” The disquiet that you experience as you dive into his cinema is a form of disorientation, a violent unmooring of your expectations as to how films should behave, and what your own relationship with them should entail. “There are stories that have a will of their own,” a character muses late into Love Torn in a Dream, and that’s true for so many of Ruiz’s, which keep on festering inside his drifters’ minds long after they are over.
Ruiz’s most evocative films all outlive the experience of watching them: consider the eccentric psychoanalyst at the center of Genealogies of a Crime (1997), who is convinced everyone is possessed by fictions, and it’s these fictions that dictate their actions. These films do not look after you, to paraphrase Serge Daney, but continue inside you; you’re not their recipient so much as a vessel through which they can grow larger and stranger. The first of Ruiz’s I ever saw was also one of his last, The Wandering Soap Opera, which was shot in 1990 but only completed decades later by his wife and longtime editor Valeria Sarmiento—among a few posthumous works she’s helped exhume since his death in 2011. A Russian doll of telenovelas whose stars are constantly aware of being watched, the film hopscotches across different TV shows, swelling from a parody of soap-opera clichés into something more oblique and surreal, with actors resurfacing in disparate settings and screens. Such is the fate of so many of the director’s heroes, who seem to exist in a limbo that encompasses several imaginary terrains. Writing about his work in a time when cinema is routinely reduced to a storytelling machine, it’s striking that he viewed stories not as finite tesserae in a mosaic, but portals that would unlock other realms.
The Wandering Soap Opera (Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento, 2017).
The Wandering Soap Opera premiered in Locarno in 2017, just two years before the release of—bear with me—Avengers: Endgame. Since then, the multiverse has become a shortcut for big studios to dust off old IPs and cater to their fandoms’ nostalgia, an approach that’s now as popular as it is deadening. Embraced by superhero drivel like Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) or a superhero spoof like the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), all the conceit has proven is that a film’s number of universes is inversely related to its number of original ideas. It’s a case of dramatic exhaustion: when an ostensibly high-stakes epic tells you its heroes can be dead in one universe but alive and well in a handful of others, nothing is irrevocable—nothing matters. And it is also an issue of narrative straitjacketing; when characters are forced to operate within such a confined and cramped network of rapid-fire alternate lives, they are often so vaguely written as to survive entirely on the charisma of the actors who embody them. Which is a shame, because a kaleidoscope of wildly different universes criss-crossing each other need not be a stultifying experience. Nor does the concept belong exclusively to superhero or large IP franchises. Hong Sang-soo might not be the most obvious case in point, but as a fittingly titled retrospective held at Lincoln Center just last year argued, the Korean’s cinema is itself a multiverse, and the framework might also go some way toward accounting for the deliriously intricate plots of many a Pampero Cine production, the Argentine collective that gave us, among others, two majestic film-labyrinths like Mariano Llinás’s La Flor (2018) and Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen (2022). It’s not the multiverse that’s broken; it’s the ways it’s been employed by blockbuster cinema that are almost impossibly sterile, and a survey of Ruiz’s filmography is an opportunity to rethink the concept as well as mainstream fiction forms.
Ruiz himself didn’t view cinema as a linear system but a combinatory one, an idea he’d articulated through the mnemotechnical experiments of medieval philosopher Ramón Lull, and would structure the universe-trotting of Love Torn in a Dream, a maze of stories intersecting each other in an ever-growing set of combinations. His are often literal fairy tales, as the first episode in Three Lives and Only One Death, when Mastroianni’s character swears his Parisian flat is haunted by fairies that ate up twenty years of his life. And Ruiz’s cinema works the way Mastroianni does on the man who listens to that absurd tall tale, first with eye-rolling indifference and then with childlike rapture. It seduces you, with astonishing ease, into a complete suspension of belief, conjuring worlds that bristle with a sense of narrative exuberance you seldom register in anything being made today.
The overall effect isn’t claustrophobia, but vertigo—derived not from the knowledge that the world you’re in is only one of infinite others, but from the realization that there are also infinitely more rewarding ways of telling stories than those popularized by commercial filmmaking. A film school dropout who cut his teeth on Chilean and Mexican TV productions, Ruiz’s idiosyncratic approach was already apparent in his earliest Chilean features of the 1960s. None of the industry’s dogmas seemed to trouble him more than what he called the “central conflict theory,” the idea that a film can only work if it is structured around a central conflict and designed to lead to its resolution. Doing so, he warned, is to eliminate all stories which do not include confrontation, and to leave aside all events and moments which, while irrelevant to plot progression, may open up other powers of the cinematic image. Which is an apt way of thinking about his feature debut Three Sad Tigers (1968), a film that forsakes a conventional three-act drama for something more expansive and elusive. It’s a largely nocturnal, alcohol-fueled odyssey through late-1960s Santiago, whose portrait of three layabouts keeps getting derailed by scenes that add nothing to an already evanescent plot: a series of drunken late-night chats and fights around the city. This interest in destabilizing audience expectations and subverting dramatic principles would survive in Ruiz’s productions abroad, starting with Dialogues of Exiles, a lightly fictionalized ethnography of Chilean refugees in Paris that’s very loosely anchored to the story of a pro-Pinochet singer whom they abduct on his French tour. It’s not that conflict is absent from the picture, only that it’s diffused, and the film dogs its deracinated subjects as they struggle to adjust to the adoptive country all while renegotiating their ties to the motherland. As employed by Ruiz, the multiverse isn’t just a narrative device, but an exhaustive précis of the life of his diasporic heroes, stuck between distinct words and constantly sliding in between them.
City of Pirates (Raúl Ruiz, 1983).
Nearly all of Ruiz’s films concern wanderers severed from their familiar turfs. The mid-1980s marked a fertile juncture in the director’s career, as his interest in maritime yarns begot two of his best, City of Pirates (1983) and Treasure Island (1986). With its garishly colored filters, assaultive use of depth of field, and elliptical script—written, per Ruiz’s own admission, “in an almost automatic way”—City of Pirates is one of Ruiz’s freest and most distinctive works. “The cinema virtually renounces its role as a recording medium,” novelist and longtime collaborator Gilbert Adair wrote about the film; everything that appears in it “seems to be invented on the spot and yet create an entirely consistent if hypnotic and oneiric world.” Here too, the plot is carried forth by associations rather than beats, with two distinct stories centered on a maid and a homicidal little boy stranded on a faraway island. The same ludic aura would ripple on to Ruiz’s take on Stevenson’s adventure novel, which reimagines its ur-text as an instruction manual for a game of the same name, played in real spaces with real lives and real casualties. People wander a lot in City of Pirates and Treasure Island; characters get routinely sidetracked, their missions aborted, paused, thwarted. Similar digressions would find no place in conflict-powered films, because they would not advance the plot; in Ruiz’s, where the plot is never fixed but seemingly negotiated between director, actor, and audience, these cul-de-sacs are as important as anything else you’re shown. If you can’t dictate what the films will look like, you are nonetheless responsible for stitching their disparate images together, and for making sense of the final assemblage.
Which is another way of saying that Ruiz’s cinema never treats you as a mere witness but an active participant in the action; his aren’t films you watch so much as play with. Even their designs suggest riddles and sleights of hand. Slanted camera angles, shifting backgrounds, highly magnified objects, split diopter shots, lurid filters—the director’s tales are an attack on the senses, and their perturbing visuals go hand in hand with his concerns for doublings, multiple personalities, and hallucinations. Take his 1994 adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband: Fado, Major and Minor, in which a tour guide (Jean-Luc Bideau) crosses paths with a younger man (Melvil Poupaud) who accuses him of having had an affair with his wife, who has since died. It’s a game of mirrors, a story repeated three times and perched somewhere between farce and tragedy, waking life and dreams, shot by Jean-Yves Coic so as to render the real indiscernible from the extraordinary. Or think again of Genealogies of a Crime, where Catherine Deneuve plays both a lawyer and the woman her teenage client has murdered, one of several cases of actorly doubling that helps heighten Ruiz’s gamesmanship and absorb you deeper into his subterfuges.
Inspired by the real-life case of Austrian psychoanalyst Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, who dreamt her homicidal nephew would kill her and was eventually murdered just as she’d predicted, Genealogies tackles another one of Ruiz’s leitmotifs, the suspicion that all events are fated to repeat themselves along the same narrative lines. It’s the old struggle between determinism and free will, and it surfaces everywhere in the Chilean’s filmography, often with humorous results, as in That Day (2003), a crime film that deflates the heroics and tropes of the genre. Ruiz regular Elsa Zylberstein plays Livia, a young Swiss woman who inherits an astounding fortune that threatens her family’s. Afraid his empire might collapse, Livia’s father (Michel Piccoli) hires a local psychopath to murder her, but the man (Bernard Giraudeau), having fallen for his target, slaughters Livia’s family instead. While the police pursue a strategy of doing absolutely nothing, frittering time away at the local café as opposed to rounding up suspects, Ruiz sprinkles the hitman’s killing spree with comic interludes and sight gags. Yet all the absurdity carries a subversive zing. Drenched in gallows humor, That Day, like Three Sad Tigers before it, embraces an episodic, scattered narrative. Neither film dramatizes political events, but they nonetheless capture their subjects’ zeitgeist through their everyday gestures, words, and actions—and the strategy makes for some vibrant and perceptive ethnographies.
Time Regained (Raúl Ruiz, 1999).
That Day was inspired by the detective novels of Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt, one of several writers Ruiz would crib from. Stevenson, Dostoyevsky, Calderón de la Barca, Racine: literature provided fodder for some of the director’s most accomplished works. Even the adaptations he didn’t pen himself radiate an undecidable strangeness. Savage Souls (2001), for one, offers such a realist take on the 1949 novel by Jean Giono as to stand among the least Ruizian films in his entire career, but that outlier too emanates a disorienting aura, channeled by tonal shifts and an often roving, restless camera. No writer, however, would influence Ruiz more than Marcel Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time would inspire one of the filmmaker’s masterpieces, Time Regained (1999), which adapts the final (and most anfractuous) book of Proust’s saga. Visually ravishing and lush as this period piece is, there is nothing museological about it. As Adrian Martin notes in an essay published in the booklet of the Viennale retrospective, Ruiz was a “voluminous magpie,” a polymath drawn to all sorts of scientific theories and concepts. He regarded Proust’s magnum opus as an illustration of philosopher-mathematician-logician Kurt Gödel’s theory of dimensional time—the belief that, in certain mystical moments, time can be experienced in its dimensional quality, as a totality. Proust’s prose could collapse time, leaving you with the illusion of recapturing different memories, all at once—much like cinema, which can only literally show the past in the present tense. In its own sinuous way, Time Regained achieves just that effect. It’s a film dotted with moments of ecstatic rapture and complex temporal images, the result of multiple superimpositions of characters, timelines, and settings within the same shot. “I felt at home filming Proust’s universe,” Ruiz would say of the project, “because it reminded me of my own films.” Beyond their mutual fascination with digressions, both writer and cineaste shared the conviction that reality was, to borrow from Michael Goddard, “a system of dissimulations”: a veil behind which were no doubt further veils, and that their media could, at their finest, probe and provoke those textures in eye-opening ways.
As it turns out, the line whose source I couldn’t recall can be traced back to Mysteries of Lisbon (2010), among the last Ruiz films to be released before his death. Another literary adaptation—of Camilo Castelo Branco’s nineteenth-century Portuguese classic of the same name—Mysteries offers a stupefying summation of the director’s cinema. Closer to the statuary beauty of Time Regained than the more lysergic looks of his 1980s projects, this sprawling diptych involves several narratives and several narrators: interwoven tales of heroic feats, tragic loves, sacrifices, conspiracies, romantic obsessions. Characters exit a storyline and bob up in another, oftentimes under different names; to complicate what’s already an immensely intricate diegesis, Mysteries is peppered with all kinds of disguises and metamorphoses. Bluebloods and bums all have a long story to tell, and they each wind up telling theirs to Father Dinis (Adriano Luz), a priest who walks through the film’s stunning period settings as a custodian of everyone’s epiphanies—a stand-in for Ruiz if there ever was one. Halfway through the second part, the young protagonist, João (João Arrais), enters Father Dinis’s forbidden quarters, a room that hosts all the costumes the clergyman has worn as the aliases you’ve seen him impersonate in earlier scenes and timelines: a soldier in Napoleon’s army, an aristocrat, a vagrant. “This is my temple to sincerity,” Dinis tells João. He’s not sarcastic. The single most important truth Ruiz’s characters arrive at through their fantastical journeys is that reality is only a vast web of stories perpetually in flux, as slippery as the identities of those who populate them. Blockbuster cinema may cheaply milk this lesson for all-too-easily rehashed narratives, but in Ruiz’s hands, it registers as an awakening. We contain multitudes; he was one of the very few who knew how to show it.