Raúl Ruiz's "Love Torn in Dream" (2000)

Watchable online (for now), a Ruiz that is "...among the most amusing, vertiginous, insolent, outlandish, delirious films imaginable."
Daniel Kasman

"This is among the most amusing, vertiginous, insolent, outlandish, delirious films imaginable. And perhaps, as well, the freest that Ruiz has ever made. It’s the kind of project where he’s absolutely free in his actions, conceiving and taking control of the film’s totality; in the exercise of this paroxysmic energy he pushes the exercise of his boundless creative imagination to its zenith, unshackled in any respect by the dominant codes."

—Guy Scarpetta, Rouge

"Raoul Ruiz's Love Torn in Dream is an inscrutably hypnotic, painterly, structurally organic, and logically impenetrable film that lyrically and visually conflates a series of historical periods, role-swapping character actors, and states of consciousness into a fanciful - albeit distended and maddeningly opaque - tale of love, fate, and destiny. Similar to Time Regained in the lush imagery and temporal fluidity of the film, Love Torn in Dream episodically interweaves several fable-like stories that include of a band of pirates marooned on a coast, a seminarian who plays an innocuous prank on a demure and beautiful nun at the confessional, a young man searching for his father, a restless wife who pines for her absent husband, and a fatigued web developer who discovers an internet site that predicts his actions 24 hours in advance. However, despite its sumptuous texturality and intricate composition, the film suffers from a tediously repetitive and defiantly nonsensical and idiosyncratic absurdist tone."

—Acquarello, Strictly Film School

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