City of Pirates
There are films that we’re not quite sure we didn’t dream. They are perhaps the most beautiful. Like this new adventure from Captain Ruiz, in the land of our beliefs.
Take a child and make sure he dreams. Wake him and tell him a story. Lull him with your most beautiful voice-over. Make your voice insidious, and don’t forget the background music. Once he falls back asleep, the child must finish dreaming the story you whispered to him. When he wakes, he must feel that the story chose him, not the other way around. An Immortal Story — so ran the title of one of Welles’s last films; but any story is immortal, that's what all of Raoul Ruiz’s films tell us. Hence much delight, then too much delight, then terror.
But if you don’t have the sleeping child, the suspended time, the voice that lulls, or the talent for improvisation (that is to say, the art of always having the last word), don’t insist, and give up trying to imitate Raoul Ruiz. He alone seems to have held onto the secret and the taste for such things. Since Welles fell silent and Buñuel departed for the Milky Way, there has been much talk of cinema’s return to fiction. But little has been said about the return of fiction itself (as one might talk of the return of the repressed or the return of Frankenstein). Ruiz’s films are stories, and they have an initiatory character. Finished, rigged, nested or malevolent, they possess a mad charm. Even if it took ten years (from the fall of Allende in 1973, which drove Ruiz from his native country, to the release, last year, of Three Crowns of the Sailor) for an audience, suddenly less negligible, to fall under that charm and march to the rhythm of that madness.
And this, despite Ruiz’s reputation for hermeticism and intellectualism, which only proves that when confronted with a true Latin American baroque, the French have a hard time admitting that their own tradition of labyrinth films, snakes and ladders and puzzle games, à la Robbe-Grillet and Resnais, is no match. That said (and said plenty; we promise we won’t say it again — next time we’ll treat Ruiz as already known, if not recognized), City of Pirates, which is something of a sequel to Three Crowns and recalls the half-successful The Territory (three films shot in Portugal) has its own tone, its private gimmicks, its dazzling accomplishments and its secret misfires. In short, a superb, dreamlike film, almost impossible to recount and totally bonkers.
Where to begin? Let’s return to the metaphor of the sleeper. We’re in the South, facing the sea, subject to all kinds of paradox. In her bedroom, Isidore is asleep. Yes, her asleep, because she’s a woman. Her mother, who seems hardly older than she is, wakes her, saying, ‘Are you sleeping, Isidore?’ ‘Tell me a story’, replies the small, childlike voice of Isidore. On a table nearby are a few banknotes left by her father: he has once again abused Isidore and has just paid her. This scene obviously gives no indication of the countless events that populate this City of Pirates, but in a sense, it contains all of Ruiz. Like Buñuel, he delights in the simplest logical permutations. Perversion of name and gender, of ages and loves, of before and after. Incest, a social tie turned into a play on words or a game of ‘Happy families’. Moreover, this ‘city’ is no more than an island, except it only has one inhabitant, who plays all the roles. When it comes to the comfort of identification (who’s who?), Ruiz is the least reliable of guides. He doesn’t believe in identity, only in cards. Forced ones, preferably.
Does Isidore kiss a carabinier, with the red shape of the kiss turning out to be that of the infamous pirate island? Does a man blow his brains out, with a piece of those brains, ejected along with a stream of blood, forming the shape of that island? At first, it’s all a riddle. By the end, there’s nothing left but piddle. In the meantime, the beautiful Isidore meets a little boy, but this cherub of evil is a master criminal. She becomes his fiancée and accomplice; she follows him to the island. She will return, yes, but in what state! We sense that the word most ill at ease in the Ruizian world is the verb ‘to be’. It’s clear that there’s nothing to gain in trying to recount City of Pirates. It’s clear that nothing is clear.
And yet. The more discouraged we become trying to identify who or what we’re seeing on screen (to the point that, by the end, we mentally cry out ‘truce!’ and verge on boredom), the more delight Ruiz takes in the appearance of things, in the material, comical weight they retain despite everything.
Two rotting corpses take a Durassian tea, a yawn is filmed from the point of view of the glottis, foreground details eat away at the image for no reason, a skull turns into a rugby ball: a whole branch of seventeenth-century Spanish painting, that of the vanitas and Valdés Leal’s Hieroglyphs of Life's End, is ready to come to life. Under the pressure of the verses.
Likewise, the more we give up trying to figure out what kind of film we’ve stumbled into (to the point that, around the halfway mark, fatigued and forsaken, we decide that enough’s enough), the more Ruiz excels at conjuring, with constant joy, the phantoms of American B movies, of Cocteau and English Hammer films. There is something of John Mohune from Lang’s Moonfleet in the little boy in City of Pirates, just as there is something of Tourneur (that of I Walked with a Zombie) in the hallucinatory tone of certain voices. As if, to apologise for the outlandishness of his tale, Ruiz were dressing it in the memory of stories in which, as children, we had so little trouble feeling at home.
The more we convince ourselves that language too has been trapped, the more Ruiz manages to make his actors speak in a very gentle tone, their voices carrying that hint of desolate sulkiness that makes even the simplest lines deeply moving. There are few filmmakers working in ‘French’ who have better captured the musicality of the French il était une fois, the tuning note that opens the door to all stories. There are few musicians who can concoct scores worthy of an ironic Hollywood Ravel better than Arriagada (Ruiz’s regular collaborator). Finally, the more we agree to follow Ruiz in his authorial madness, the more we have to admit that he is more and more assured in his choice of actors. In City of Pirates, Anne Alvaro (Isidore) and Melvil Poupaud (the little boy) are particularly good.
All of this, you’ll say, has a name. Yes: seduction. But it’s the form that is seductive. What remains is the content. Ruiz is not a hollow aesthete. There is a content to his stories, and I find it staggering. A content replete with filth and promiscuity that no poetry can completely silence. Filmmakers — as I said at the beginning (to provoke) — have almost all lost the sense of narrative. And so the only one who has preserved it intact (Ruiz) has made it his own personal folly. The viewer, ‘too Cartesian’, will be less disoriented by a film like City of Pirates if they make the effort to see Three Crowns of the Sailor (which is still showing in one cinema in Paris). In that film, Ruiz set out the conditions under which a story could be immortal. It needed fresh meat. That of the one who would tell of how he believed it had only ever happened to him. That of the one to whom the story would be told, and who would (wrongly) think it would never happen to him. Once immortal, the story endlessly returns. In City of Pirates, it returns first as an adventure film, second as a Cocteauvian theatre, third as a theological paper, and fourth as a dialogue between the dead.
To live is to dream a story; to die is to tell it. Eternity remains for rotting.
First published in Libération on 25th February 1984. Reprinted in Ciné Journal, Seuil, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. Translated by Sam Warren Miell with minor changes.
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