The arthouse heavyweights of today, the very most highbrow of the planet's vanguard auteurs, pretty much have one trait in common. Not only are they fans of the long, long take — a handy prop for the financially challenged — they are also opponents of the tasty, treat-filled, surprise-laden Conventional Narrative. Think of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and his torpid, tropical non-events unfolding under a widescreen swath of mosquito net; or Hou Hsiao-hsien, floating limpidly over the anticlimax of a drunken banquet; or Bruno Dumont, gaping at his rocklike protagonists like the holy village idiot. You do not come out humming the plot of their pictures. The filmmakers invite you to experience the moment but not follow the thread. The now is all.
Not so Raul Ruiz, the great Chilean-born filmmaker who died last month, leaving us a surpassing masterpiece, Mysteries of Lisbon. Ruiz blew out the speakers of orthodox cinema not by subtracting from story but by giving much too much. His movies literally leak an excess of narrative. If you had to sum up this master in two words, I'd choose story infestation: plotting in his movies operates like a small fleet of mosquitoes signaling the home team and turning into a full-blown invasion.
In an early masterpiece, Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979; available in full on YouTube), two narrators scrutinize and speculate on a series of paintings. After the fashion of Dario Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome, we kinda fall into the images, but not really; the commentary opens the can of worms that is these paintings, and their stories invade our world. In Three Crowns of the Sailor (1982), a child raconteur's tall tales provoke the same storytelling impulse — like a virus triggering symptoms — in an unlikely (and often dangerous) group of random others. Like Scheherezade running through a labyrinth, a Ruiz movie introduces one big story only to leapfrog to another and another, and surprises happen when the stories reconnect, contradict, and oftentimes eat each other.
Not sold yet? Not ready to move Ruiz up and Hot Fuzz down on your Netflix queue? Let's put it this way: Ruiz was the most sensuous, most pleasure-driven, and by far the most impatient of contemporary avant-garde directors. His epics are built for the era of hypertext and the refresh button. In the four-and-a-half hour Lisbon, possibly Ruiz's most colossal work (but who can be sure? Look at IMDB! There are a million things we'll never get to see!), a young boy in an orphanage (Joao Arrais) seeks to find out who his father was and what, precisely, is tormenting the mystery woman he suspects is his mother. As the young Joao attempts to crack the enigma of his own creation, a torrent of secret histories comes unstuck. A priest is really a reformed street crook in disguise, a reputable businessman is a onetime hired child assassin, and even the most transparently goody-good characters contain alternate universes.
Like Todd Haynes' leviathan Mildred Pierce, Lisbon is the showstopping work of an essayist on narrative form finally leaping, unself-consciously, into the baptizing waters of pure story itself. On one level, you can view Lisbon as a kind of psychoanalysis of why humans create stories about themselves — and the answer is, usually to defend against seeing, or letting others see, the worst parts of themselves. At the same time, Lisbon is a seemingly infinite (and infinitely absorbing) series of Russian-doll narratives — a cascade of hidden personal backstories that you feel could extend out to all of humankind. The incidental pleasures, like the staggering beauty of Ruiz's actress Maria Joao Bastos (overdue to drink Marion Cotillard's milkshake) and the gooseflesh-raising power of his composer Jorge Arriagada, recall David Lean's adaptations of Dickens and Forster.
Ruiz was taken from us much too soon, just as he seemed to be getting a Philip Roth-like second wind. You can imagine Ruiz entering something like Bunuel's 1960s and '70s golden age. But the legacy he has left us is uniquely suited to our moment. In an era when story, character, even the kernel of a thought is sliced into ever-tinier, faster-flickering attention-deficit units of time and space, Ruiz offers the refreshing opposite: Profusion. A slow, tantalizing rollout that feels like a magic-carpet ride. And above all, work that doesn't pick you up, spin you and drop you back at Home Base like a theme-park ride, but rather makes a tantalizing, potentially dangerous offer to drop everything and stay lost in the maze.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
