A baroque mix of revolutionary politics, pop culture and semiotics loosely based on the play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. A young prince learns that life is just a dream from which we wake when we die. And that dreams may be as real as life.
France
Canada
Canada
France
Dear Criterion or anyone who is qualified,
Please restore Raul Ruiz's films, most notably this one and Manuel on the Island of Wonders. They are absolutely incredible and deserve to be seen in a way that's better than a VHS rip.
"I often dream of dark rooms".
I always love when Ruiz goes into fully hallucinatory mode. I wish this was available in a restoration, but even in a faded copy those images are to get lost into.
A dazzling, maddening Wunderkammer where cinema, dream, and reality all collapse into the same constantly shape-shifting plane. A classical play hides the plots of political resistance (“Each line hid a militant’s name, each metaphor an address, each stanza an armed operation”), the popular cinemas of the past reveal the disenchanted political realities of the post-resistance present, and the cinema becomes a place not to escape reality but one that consistently generates new shards of reality, one after another. “The lines, linked with objects, remind him of long forgotten events that evoke half-forgotten movies.” Life may not be a dream, but rather like a film in which we each play our temporary role, sometimes in a romance, sometimes a murder mystery,…
"He thinks he understands now: each line must be linked... to one set image."
-"What is it to be Chilean?"
-"Like being dead."
-"From what?"
-"Laughter."
-"I dreamed I was alive."
-"It must be awful, no?"
...I'm afraid that I severely underrated this Ruiz film the first time I saw it, for some reason, I think I might have either been very tired or possibly drunk or both (I have since learned that Ruiz films are generally best appreciated sober, as they provide their own form of intoxication and adding to it tends to turn them into a jumble of incomprehensible nonsense, which they often sort of are anyway, but still...). Whatever the reason, I now see that it is…
In adapting the 17th-century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, it’s only natural that Ruiz would go off-book, and for Life Is a Dream, de la Barca’s La vida es sueño is only a jumping-off point for the director to tackle the 1971 coup in his homeland of Chile. Sylvain Thirolle stars as a literature professor who uses lines from the play as a mnemonic device to memorize the names of 15,000 disappeared Chilean dissidents. Alongside glimpses of lurid period drama and a hilarious Star Wars send-up, Ruiz features footage from his own Avignon staging of the play to interrogate the dubious feedback loop between experience and thought, and the brokerage of dreams (to say nothing of cinema) in reconstructing memory.
As usual, Ruiz's vision impresses and confounds me, a film such as this showing its genesis as the product of a man so widely read and steeped in the traditions of cinema and theatre as well as a life lived across cultures. Based on a 17th century Spanish play of the same name, Life is a Dream reminds me a lot of the tragically underseen masterwork of Portuguese cinema released a year later, O Bobo (The Jester) - both adapt baroque theatrical/cinematic conventions and give them a strong political underpinning, transforming them into ultimately melancholic responses to the soul-crushing drudgery imposed by the fascist regimes in Chile or in Portugal. Where Ruiz differs is of…
There is mystery and poetry in every shot. Sci-Fi, adventures, politics revisited in a film theater. If dream is reality then being alive becomes the absolute fiction. If you loved "Manoel in the Island of Wonders", "City of Pirates" and "Love Torn in a Dream", then you should watch this one.
I truly find it tragic and, maybe, even a little frustrating that perhaps one of the most fascinating and creative screenplays ever put to film is preserved like an empty can of soda that kids play street-football with. I truly wish Criterion, or anyone capable, rediscovers Ruiz's filmography one day and gives it the proper care it deserves.
Life is a Dream is probably the most puzzling film in Ruiz's catalogue that I've seen so far. A narrative that's made up of countless mere fragments, barely-cohesive yet tightly tied together by dream logic. Reality and fiction in constant mutation, overlaping and melting into each other. Innovative visuals, sadly butchered by the VHS quality of the film.
Still, I find myself…
meta-commentary in post-2010s cinema: vague referencial gestures to things people enjoyed much more outside of the current film they are watching, surely forgetting the existence of the immediate film in front of them in favor of better, more noteworthy works of art.
meta-commentary via Raul Ruiz: witness such wonders and fear it. objects, toys, images, artificial creation is still a creation, ergo it is still reality and therefore life; dreams only exist with life, therefore life is dreams; we only wake up when we die; so we must keep dreaming. here are the most vivid, colorful saturated gels and filters you've ever seen on 35mm. let this be a lesson of spectacle.
someone please restore his filmography I AM BEGGING SOMEONE, ANYONE
Ruiz chronologically... is perhaps my dream come true?
Man, that "show, don't tell" bunch must hate Ruiz. Whenever he is not telling – and his narrators tell a lot – he shows stuff that most likely distracts one from the core message of the story. Surprisingly, in this case, I'd argue that story is relatively straightforward and accessible, and the strange stuff is a perfect combination of obscure and reality-grounded. And while it feels a bit random in the middle, it truly becomes something else before it's over. By telling quite a lot.
Ruiz has been into metafiction ever since he began this whole business, but, in case I'm not entirely mistaken, this is his first movie that explicitly deals…
As dizzying as a lucid dream, as confusing, as beautiful....Raoul Ruiz at his best.
"The next film is The Iron Mask, a movie he's seen many times. He recognizes the visuals, but feels he understands nothing. Deja vu becomes never seen."
Ruiz creates a dream of falling asleep and waking up to find yourself in a dream of falling asleep and waking up, falling asleep and waking up...
