[The Daily] Life Is a Dream: The Films of Raúl Ruiz

Life Is a Dream: The Films of Raúl Ruiz, opening today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York and running through February 18, is the second half of an extensive retrospective organized by Dennis Lim and Dan Sullivan. The first half ran in December 2016, and I gathered critical reaction throughout that run here. A highlight of this round is a new restoration of Time Regained (1999), whose week-long run also begins today.

“Raúl Ruiz frequently remarked that he was the perfect person to adapt Marcel Proust’s vast set of novels Remembrance of Things Past (or, more literally, In Search of Lost Time) to the screen because, having reached the end of reading the entire work, he instantly forgot it all,” writes Adrian Martin in the Notebook. “He was joking, of course, but his jest disguised a serious method. The only way to convey Proust on screen, in Ruiz’s opinion, was to approach it not as a literal condensation of multiple characters and events, but as a psychic swirl of half-remembered, half-forgotten fragments and impressions—full of uncanny superimpositions and metamorphoses. ‘The best way to adapt something for film,’ he summed up, ‘is to dream it.’”

“As omnipresent as Proust’s narrator, the camera insinuates itself among the glamorous cast,” writes J. Hoberman for the New York Times. “Catherine Deneuve plays the former courtesan Odette de Crecy, with Emmanuelle Béart as her daughter Gilberte. Ms. Deneuve’s actual daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, has a cameo as the elusive Albertine. Marie-France Pisier trills her way through the film as the social climbing Madame Verdurin. Pascal Greggory and John Malkovich also have juicy roles, as Gilberte’s unfaithful husband and the cheerfully depraved Baron de Charlus. . . . Proust is a writer whose work defeated such distinguished adapters as Joseph Losey and Luchino Visconti; Ruiz succeeds because his movie is something of a search for Proust’s own search.”

Screening this evening, Sunday afternoon, and again on February 17 is The Wandering Soap Opera, and here’s how the FSLC introduces it: “In 1990, Ruiz conducted six days of acting workshops and filming in his native Chile, yielding a small wealth of 16mm footage that was never edited together until Valeria Sarmiento, Ruiz’s wife and chief collaborator, returned to it nearly six years after Ruiz’s death in 2011.” The premiere was in Locarno last summer, and I gathered reviews here.

Jaime Grijalba talks with Sarmiento for Film Comment: “If you put together everything that Raúl did, it just turned into a very strange thing. So I decided that we had to divide it into chapters, days, to make it more playful. I filmed old TV sets, and I inserted the footage inside them to give the telenovela the sensation of vertigo that it should have. You don’t know where you are, and then you realize that you’re inside the telenovela, or outside of it, or you’re looking at the telenovela, and the idea was to play with that.”

For more on Ruiz, his page at Critics Round Up is a rich resource. And as more reviews appear throughout the series, we’ll be making note of them here.

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