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August 24, 2011

Love Torn In A Dream

I was watching a film at the theater the other day which, fifteen minutes in, was approaching a point of such rapturous quality that I considered walking out. Why not go out on top, especially if, all things being equal and statistics being what they were, the chances that such quality could not be maintained for the remaining 70-odd minutes were fairly high? It's a turning of the tables on the passive viewing experience that I don't necessarily disapprove of, but in my case I haven't suffered such an egregious loss of faith as to enact it. That ain't what I'm in this for. The movie dipped, as some movies do, and then rose back up. The one I saw the next morning hit a similar early high and then kept getting better. You just never know.

Last night, I was getting ready to turn in when I saw a link to a film by the late Raoul Ruiz. It was his 2000 feature Love Torn In A Dream, in its entirety, on YouTube. I'd never seen a Ruiz film (I had high hopes of catching The Mysteries Of Lisbon at the LA Film Festival a few months ago, but they never came to pass). All the same, I found his profile in the New York Times a few weeks ago immensely beguiling, and its timeliness retrospectively moving in light of his passing last week. So the whim seemed nothing if not appropriate, and I sat up until the sun was about to rise watching this marvelously droll parlor game of a film, whose pleasures seem to function an almost synaptic level.

I need to find a copy of Time Regained.

Posted by David Lowery at August 24, 2011 11:27 AM