Raoul Ruiz

In French cinema my biggest discovery has been Raoul Ruiz, a Chilean émigré who stopped filming in 1967, at emigration, and then resumed again in 1996; I have only seen two of his recent films so far, The Genealogies of Crime and Ce Jour-la, but they have made me hunger to see more (Klimt and Le Temps Retrouve, a rendition of Proust). Both the films which I have seen had been shot in exquisite, lavish interiors of beautiful villas; with stunning, acrobatic camera-work which distracts the viewer away from the action towards the incredible interior decoration; camera-work which is beautiful and often weird – steep angles looking up staircases or up from the floor; camera swinging back and forth rotating 180 degrees through the ceiling while going from one interlocutor to the next; reflections in mirrors, two way mirrors, reflecting pools, shots through empty glasses and full fish tanks; background shadows distorted by moving lights foreshadowing future events. The plots are extremely odd (in a Borges kind of way), hard to follow, intentionally confused in a myriad little ways (some are there clearly for no other reason than to sew further confusion: for example, a certain person, called by everybody ‘Monsieur George’ keeps correcting them that his name really is ‘Didier, Georges Didier’, but if you freeze the frame to look at his business card you see that his name is ‘Didier Georges’, etc.); some multiple roles are played by a single actor; and the heroes play psychoanalytical games in which they switch places (I-am-you-and-you-are-me) adding further confusion. The dialogue is often inscrutable, practically Bretonian. The final resolution appears to wash over one at the end, a bit like a Faulknerian sentence, in a not-quite revelation: you end up with the feeling that you get it, kind of, almost. Or – do you? It’s really quite wonderful in a reassemble-an-ancient-text-from-a pile-of-broken-cuneiform-tablets sort of way; like exploring an ancient rediscovered subterranean funeral maze of a lost and forgotten civilization. The genealogies of crime I watched through once and then immediately pressed the play button to watch it all over again, this time taking frequent pauses to inspect particular shots.

It could be compared to the better films of Peter Greenaway (The draftsman’s contract, The Cook, the thief, his wife and her lover), except that it is far brainier, far more intelligent.