Main Cast: Melvil Poupaud, Elsa Zylberstein, Lambert Wilson, Christian Vadim, Diogo Doria
Release Year: 2000
Country: FR/PT/CL
Run Time: 126 minutes
Plot
Raul Ruiz's Love Torn in a Dream is introduced with a fake newsreel, taking place in postwar France, in which the cast of the film meet with the producer, who explains the film's complex weave of nine narratives. A diagram in which each story is represented by a letter of the alphabet explicates the intertwining of the nine tales. As the producer explains each actor's role, the film begins. The stories, rooted in folklore, bump up against each other as the film leaps back in forth in time. They involve a jewel stolen from a painting, a mirror that "steals" what it reflects, a seminary student who dresses as a priest to hear the nuns' confessions, brothers who combat each other in their search for a group of rings, a man whose everyday life is predicted by a website 24 hours in advance, a Catholic who finds out he's really Jewish, and a treasure map that leads to a pirate's chest. Each of the main cast members plays multiple roles. Ruiz veterans Melvil Poupaud and Elsa Zylberstein play the lead roles, while Lambert Wilson, Christian Vadim, Diogo Dória, José Meireles, and Rogério Samora play supporting roles. The film won the FIPRESCI Award at the 2000 Montreal World Film Festival, and was shown as part of the "Film Comment Selects" series at New York's Lincoln Center in 2003. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
Review
Director Raul Ruiz has said, “My films are not fiction films but about fiction,” and that is certainly true of the beguilingly complex and goofy Love Torn in a Dream. The film overlaps a surfeit of amusing narratives, with several cast members in multiple roles. While it’s hard to miss the director’s visual wit or his usual clever use of non-synchronous sound, some of his verbal playfulness will be lost in translation for those who don’t speak French, and the plots become very difficult (intentionally so) to follow. “A treasure map is a treasure,” says one character in the film, and so we’re asked to accept Ruiz’s mind-bogglingly multi-tiered narrative, not for where it leads us, not in the hope of some sort of resolution, but for the pleasures it offers along the long, twisted journey. Chief among those are the sweetly engaging performance of Ruiz regular Melvil Poupaud, as several lost heroes, and the lovely cinematography of Acácio de Almeida. There’s a playfulness to the film that belies Ruiz’s more profound themes about the nature of identity, image, and narrative, and despite the fact that it grows wearisome at over two hours, on first viewing the film seems more slight than it may actually be. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
