Trois vies et une seule mort (1996)
Directed by Raoul Ruiz

Film Review

In a film which looks suspiciously as if was conceived as a swansong for the legendary Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni , Chilean director Raoul Ruiz achieves a masterful melange of the surreal, the absurd, the melancholy and the quite frankly disturbing.   All of Ruiz' films have the character of a puzzle about them, but Trois vies et une seule mort remains his most baffling and intellectually demanding work to date.  This is one of those films where the closer you look, the more inexplicable it appears.  Yet, no matter how deeply you probe, you still have the feeling that it all makes some kind of sense.  Even the bizarre flights of fancy into Buñelesque surrealism appear believable, as Ruiz has somehow succeeded in warping our understanding of the world around us.

This is not an easy film to watch - it requires a great deal of concentration, a certain amount of imagination and a willingness on the part of the spectator to participate in it.  For anyone who is prepared to invest the effort to make the experience work, Trois vies et une seule mort is a hugely satisfying film, which offers a substantial payback through its twisted comedy and the feeling that you have at least partly solved a profoundly complex mystery.

Where Ruiz excels is in the area of cinematography - his films are so beautifully filmed that they can on that basis alone be considered as works of art.  In this film, this particular talent allows him to conjure up a world which is neither fantasy nor real, but existing in some sinister twilight world between the two, where the rules of normal everyday experience are obeyed, but only up to a point.   It is this which gives the film the character of a dream, and which makes the film resist our attempts to find some rational explanation in what we see.  Consciously we know that it is all an incoherent jumble, yet something compels us to keep looking for a pattern.  We delude ourselves into thinking we have the explanation, but when the film ends we realise how flawed and subjective our interpretation is. In a similar vein to the writings of Frantz Kafka and the films of Alain Resnais, the film mocks our confidence in the notion of an objective reality.   We can trust - or distrust - whatever we see in this film, to the extent that no two spectators will end up drawing the same conclusions.  This level of conscious subjectivity is comparatively rare in cinema, something which make this film special and particularly rewarding.

Marcello Mastroianni's presence dominates the film, indeed haunts it like a world-weary ghost.  It goes without saying that in this, his last film appearance bar one, his performance (or rather performances, since he plays four characters), is faultless.  In the film's chilling third segment (a mixture of children's fairytale and Edgar Allen Poe), we have the pleasure of seeing the great actor appearing alongside his real-life daughter, Chiara Mastroianni.  There is a palpable sense of regret when Mastroianni walks off into the sunset at the end of the film, and irony that a man who has brought to life so many characters should himself die but once.

Film Synopsis

A radio broadcaster narrates a series of remarkable tales from his studio, beginning with the story of travelling salesman Mateo Strano.  After a period of twenty years, Strano returns to his first wife Maria to find that she is living with another man, André.  Having gained Andre's confidence by telling him that he has been bewitched by fairies for the past two decades, Strano lures André to his apartment and kills him, before reacquainting himself with Maria.  In the next story, a professor at the Sorbonne, Georges Vickers, turns his back on his invalid mother, his home and his job and finds he can earn just as much money as a tramp.  He is befriended by a prostitute, Tania, who turns out to be the head of a large company.  The third story begins with a couple of newly weds, Martin and Cecile, discovering that they have a mysterious benefactor.  The impecunious couple learn that they have inherited a château along with a valet whom they must keep at all costs.  When they realise that they are being slowly poisoned, the young couple make a quick exit.  Finally, wealthy industrialist Luc Allamand starts to have a mental collapse when the family he invented to impress his clients suddenly enter his life.  In an explosive finale, the four main protagonists in these four stories turn out to be fragments of the same man...