One of Raul Ruiz’s best features, this is also one of his looniest — shot in Holland in about a week’s time, although it’s supposedly set in Patagonia. The putative SF plot concerns a French anthropologist and his Dutch wife who are hired to study the indecipherable language spoken by two members of an Indian tribe; in fact, this is a dazzling intellectual goof, with an average of one striking visual idea per shot (the gorgeous color cinematography, including many trick shots, is by the great Henri Alekan, who filmed Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast), a lot of gags involving the pretensions of anthropologists and psychoanalytical theorists, and other forms of nonstop invention. This being a Ruiz film, you shouldn’t expect anything from the story or the performances; the dialogue is in five or six languages (one of them invented), and the lead actress appears to have learned her English lines phonetically (1982, 93 min.).
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I’ve never been a big fan of Chinese director Chen Kaige’s work, but this opium dream about incestuous longings is clearly his best piece of direction, stylistically voluptuous and pictorial in the best sense. Shot by the remarkable Christopher Doyle, perhaps the most talented cinematographer working in Asia, and starring Gong Li and Leslie Cheung, it’s full of ravishing poetry, even though it isn’t very involving on a narrative level. Since its Cannes premiere it’s been cut by ten minutes or so and decked out with titles intended mainly to clarify the story line and distinguish characters (the usual aim of Miramax’s compulsive meddling), but this has done damage to the film’s hypnotic and hallucinatory rhythms, especially in the early sections. Once one gets past this choppiness, Chen’s use of offscreen sounds as emotional and atmospheric punctuation and his exquisite uses of color, lighting, framing, and camera movement conspire to make this a beautifully overripe example of Baudelairean cinema. Shu Kei wrote the elliptical script, based on a story by the director and Wang Anyi, set in and around Shanghai from 1911 to sometime in the 1920s. Water Tower. (JR)
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