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Joy of learning, as Godard would say, its curios and terrors, "a film about survival." Chance encounters at the Dutch Soviet Republic, the anthropologist (Jean Badin) and his wife (Willeke van Ammelrooy) invited by the "communist millionaire" (Fernando Bordeu) to his crumbling Patagonia villa. South American tribes and their collective telepathy are the subjects of research, the two surviving natives are balefully impish fellows who resist domesticity by repeatedly reinventing their language. "Too much culture leads to barbarism," or is it the other way around? The droll ennui of characters trying to translate each other at the edge of the world, a science-fiction lampoon that's also the culmination of Raoul Ruiz's esoteric researches. Deciphering words and images is an arduous, humorous process, such is cinema, multiple meanings crowd the frame like overlapping hands. Polyglot shifts, often mid-sentence, are de rigueur, so are diary entries ("Eva and Eden buried our mirrors. Slept badly"). Unseen bombardments, described mirages. Woozy filters, ruddy and purplish gels to go with random changes in focus and camera positions, anything to keep the screen from stabilizing. Snapshots plus "metaphors, double and triple metaphors," dictionaries. A grand Ruiz cryptogram, a wondrous dose of Henri Alekan impressionism. Cultural colonialism isn't complete until tea time is set, afterward the Indians are ready to argue about Mozart and Beethoven. René Char's "intransitive poet," Baudelaire's monstrous child. "My favorite language. Pity no one uses it." The closing view has the indigenous and the traveler on the warped landscape, the gaze of a cinéaste with no borders. With Herbert Curiel, Amber De Grau, Luis Mora, and Ernie Navarro.
--- Fernando F. Croce |