"The most glorious achievement of Ruiz’s prodigious career and one of the first cinematic masterpieces of this century."
(Mistérios de Lisboa). The noble and the damned are interchangeable in Raúl Ruiz’s magisterial gambit on the art of storytelling, based on a nineteenth-century Portuguese novel yet more radical than any contemporary tale. A young Lisbon orphan wonders who he is, but soon every possible identity comes into question, especially as flashbacks, flash-forwards, and tales within tales spiral forth. What remains is the sumptuous setting: a decadent Old World Portugal of crumbling estates and extravagant ballrooms. A tale of tales, of orphans, counts, and duels, this costume metadrama is Dickens filtered through a Surrealist’s gaze, and a fitting summation of Ruiz’s artistry. Jason Sanders
Written by Carlos Saboga, based on the book by Camilo Castelo Branco. Photographed by André Szankowski. With Adriano Luz, Maria Joäo Bastos, Ricardo Pereira, Clotilde Hesme. (272 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles,
Color, Blu-ray, From Music Box Films)
(In conjunction with our series The Library Lover: The Films of Raúl Ruiz)
The Return of a Library Lover is the title of an autobiographical short by Chilean director Ra.l Ruiz, and looking over his remarkable filmography it’s easy to see why: adaptations of Dante, Kafka, Proust, Calderón, Pierre Klossowski, Camilo Castelo Branco, and Sadegh Hedayat dot his career, while a list of citations could include Borges, Lacan, Le Petit Prince, and nineteenth-century Catholic thought—often in the same film. Intensely cerebral, his films are also highly entertaining, often hilarious, and always surprising. “The world of his movies . . . is at once soothingly, elegantly familiar and booby-trapped with surprises,” wrote A. O. Scott. “There are sudden disappearances, long-buried secrets coming to light, supernatural happenings and bizarre coincidences. In his universe, improbability is the rule.”
Born in Chile in 1941, Ruiz studied law and theology before attending film school in Argentina. Returning to Chile, he completed only a handful of works before the 1973 military coup forced him into exile in France, where he began a nearly forty-year career spanning several continents. Early successes funded by European television led to bigger budgets—by the mid-1990s Ruiz was able to work with such international stars as John Malkovich (Time Regained), Catherine Deneuve (Geneologies of a Crime), and Marcello Mastroianni (Three Lives and Only One Death).
Ruiz passed away in August of 2011, having completed one last film in his native Chile after the international success of Mysteries of Lisbon. His films embrace a “logic governed by miracles,” as he wrote, a “poetics of cinema” that remains unmatched in its freedom.
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