Le Domaine Perdu (The Lost Domain)

Published on November 11, 2007

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France, Spain, Italy, Romania / 2004 : Raúl Ruiz Director and scriptwriter : Ion Marionescu Photography : François Cluzet / Grégoire Colin / Christian Colin / Julie Delarme / Robert Florentin Ilie / Laurence Cordier / Julien Honoré / Marianne Denicourt / Edith Scob Cast

THE TWISTED CINEMA OF RUIZ

Will the lost book ¬—the supposed weaver element of the film— be a member of the audience?

I do not know. “The one-eyed cinema”, as the English critics named it thirteen years ago, of this Chilean director (the most known among the unknown ones) runs away of any performance, and never, obviously, straight ahead. Ruiz loves curves, turns and the “other sight”. His cinema is difficult and maybe for that reason is fascinating. It is a challenge for the audience due to the lack of conventions that must mean before beginning to see his films; a tribute to the creative freedom, to the humour, to the irony. Domenèch Font, a cinema critic from Catalonia and professor of the University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, referred, in the Seminary dedicated to Raúl Ruiz and parallel to the activities of the Seville Film Festival when talking about Ruiz´s cinema, to his “rizomatic condition” of curl and misplacement, that goes from branch to branch of a hard-to-identify-tree. For this reason, sometimes, one finds it incongruous and absurd, like Ionesco style or Becket style. The ambiguity, the dreams, the subconscious, but also the cinematographic meta-speech (meta-language in Becket) are generally the big topics of his wide filmography. Kafka, Stevenson and Borges are some of the sources of Raúl Ruiz. According to D. Font, he is the big “Borgian” film maker and therefore “the big liar”. All this with a baroque rhetoric in a mirrors game in which one does not really know the exact relation between the characters, their condition of alive or dead, their space and their time. A strange nebula for chaotic minds, but with a special and latent order, and Ruiz will probably have a mind like these ones.

Concha Hierro del Hoyo