Radical, prolific, ironic - the longtime Parisian-based Chilean émigré Raoul Ruiz has turned his hand to a vast range of genres and fantasies. Starting with hackwork on Mexican tele-novellas way back in the 60s, Ruiz has gone on to craft intelligent and, on occasion, mind-bending discourses on the nature of art, as instanced in L'Hypothese du tableau volé (1978).
With Trois vies et une seule mort, Ruiz is given a free hand by producer Paulo Branco, the Portuguese maestro who has encouraged and helped in the careers of such high-profile auteurs as Manoel de Oliveira and Wim Wenders. Branco promised and got Marcello Mastroianni for the film. When you know you will be directing Mastroianni, anyone would think you would write a star part into the role for the great man to play. But not Ruiz. Instead, he wrote a great number of parts for him in a film which has four episodes and a central character, played by Mastroianni, who is suffering in each one from a multiple personality disorder.
Although laced with far greater eroticism, Trois vies et une seule mort harks back in some ways to the playful but never strident exposé of human foibles in Luis Buñuel's late comedies, such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. In the first tale, Mastroianni leaves his house and his wife (Marisa Paredes) for a short trip, but fails to return home. For 20 years, he lives in the apartment opposite in the company of sprites and, at the end of this introductory segment, persuades his wife's new husband (Feodor Atkine) to visit him.
In the second novella, Mastroianni becomes a revered professor of 'negative anthropology' at the Sorbonne. He gives up his job and becomes a beggar, falling in love with a wacky hooker, Tania, played by Anna Galiena. She is a 'maitresse' in Pigalle, who turns out to be a top executive with a large corporation.
In the third tale, a penniless but chain-bonking young couple suddenly inherit a lovely mansion and an endowment. There is just one catch: they cannot get rid of the mansion's decrepit butler (Mastroianni). The young lovers gradually realise that the majordomo of the mansion is in fact its owner and their benefactor. Ruiz's last episode knots the other three. An extended play on the name of Carlos Castaneda, it has Mastroianni as a powerful businessman, Luc Allemand, who invents a family. His worse nightmare comes true when these fictional relations suddenly become reality and start turning up on his doorstep.
"The films of Mastroianni that I like most are those he made with Ettore Scola, where he had room to invent things," says the director. "In the films with Fellini, he is great but more conditioned by the general structure of the films."
Pitched midway between "nightmare and comedy", according to Ruiz, many of the storylines of Trois vies et une seule mort may ring some bells. But that, for Ruiz, was the idea: "They're stories that everybody knows but no one believes. Three tales which are in fact one, because the three men form one person, who is affected by the so-called 'multiple personality syndrome'. He has three lives, but, like everyone, just one death…I've just tried to make a 'cubist' structure of them, if you like."
This structure, says Ruiz, obeys ultimately a realist impulse. "We live in a world of stories," he explains. "One day, without being conscious of it, you can live out a story which has been written many times before, and you can also move from one story to another. In my films, I play a lot on this transfer. But everything is tied up in the stories.
"I'm an old friend of Barbet Schroeder who brought me on to a project which was finally made by someone else called Never Talk to a Stranger. It dealt with a character who had a split personality," Ruiz continues. "I met Americans who specialised in multi-personality disorder syndrome (MPD), and I saw that there was a mine of stories here, but that the best way to develop them was through comedy."
Multi-personality disorder is "in a way, the illness of the 21st century," he concludes. "A mental, or rather moral, disorder which consists of compartmentalising oneself and constructing a personality for other people. When you see one person, you're one thing, when you see another, you take on a different personality. It's so delirious that I had a kind of 'flash'. I said to myself that you could mix the subject of multi personalities with multiple stories which are really one and the same."
John Hopewell
Prod co: Gemini Films
Prod: Paolo Branco
Dir: Raoul Ruiz.
Scr: Raoul Ruiz, Pascal Bonitzer
Ph: Laurent Machuel.
Music: Jorge Arriagada.
Editor: Rodolfo Wedeles.
Cast: Anna Galiena, Melvil Poupaud, Chiara Mastroianni, Arielle Dombasle.
Running time: 123mins
International sales: Gemini Films
