Love Torn in Dreams
Synopsis
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.
Source : rottentomatoes.com
Credits
Director (1)
Actors (14)
Production and distribution (5)
- Executive Producer : Gemini Films
- Foreign production company : Madragoa Filmes
- Film exports/foreign sales : The Bureau Sales
- French distribution : Gemini Films
- News agency (France) : Le Public Système Cinéma
Full credits (14)
- Executive Producer : Paulo Branco
- Screenwriter : Raoul Ruiz
- Director of Photography : Acacio De Almeida
- Music Composer : Jorge Arriagada
- Editor : Valeria Sarmiento
- Sound recordists : Pierre-Yves Lavoué, Georges-Henri Mauchant
- Costume designer : Isabel Branco
- Line Producers : Laurent Baudens, Valentina Merli
- Voice : Mathieu Demy, Laurent Malet
- Sound Assistant : Nicolas D'Halluin
- Production Manager : Joaquim Carvalho
- Press Attaché (film) : Bruno Barde
- Production Designer : Isabel Branco
- Sound Mixer : Gérard Rousseau
Media Gallery
Technical details
- Type : Feature film
- Genres : Fiction, Experimental
- Sub-genre : Poetry
- Themes : Love, Surrealism
- Production language : French, Portuguese
- Coproducer countries : Portugal, France
- Original French-language productions : Unspecified
- Nationality : Majority French (Portugal, France)
- Production year : 2000
- French release : 22/11/2000
- Runtime : 2 h 2 min
- Current status : Released
- Visa number : 98.429
- Visa issue date : 16/11/2000
- Approval : Yes
- Production formats : 35mm
- Color type : Color
- Aspect ratio : 1.66
- Audio format : Dolby SR
Box-office & releases
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News & awards
Selections (2)
Delegations (1)
About
"I wanted to make a film using the traditional ingredients of children’s fairy tales. Connoisseurs of the genre will easy recognize references to Hans Christian Andersen ("The Traveling Companion"), Portuguese and Chilean folklore (the ghost town of Anlia, the city of Caesars, the sorcerer’s cave of Recta province, the Salamanca grotto), as well as Jewish traditions (the secret name, the seven books). There are also many inventions of my own, a narrative linking device that owes much to the "Thousand and One Nights", and a number of borrowings from the Brothers Grimm." Raoul Ruiz
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This is among the most amusing, vertiginous, insolent, outlandish, delirious films imaginable. And perhaps, as well, the freest that Ruiz has ever made. It’s the kind of project where he’s absolutely free in his actions, conceiving and taking control of the film’s totality; in the exercise of this paroxysmic energy he pushes the exercise of his boundless creative imagination to its zenith, unshackled in any respect by the dominant codes.
Here, the familiar features of Ruiz’s universe – parallel worlds, baroque uncertainties, telescoping of different times, co-presence of multiple spaces, deconstruction of characters, transgression of every parameter of classical narrative – are subject to an overflowing enthusiasm and gamesmanship, causing spectators to forget their usual reference points and drawing them into an intellectual and perceptual intoxication where there is no longer anything stable to hold onto.
But we must not conclude that the film proceeds from the pure arbitrariness of an unbridled imagination. Quite the contrary, and this is the first great paradox to be emphasised: nothing, here, is left to chance. The internal construction of the narrative follows a very strict logic; the totality is calculated on the basis of preordained constraints (a little like certain writing experiments of the Oulipo group) that govern its development.
So, at the outset, we have the template of a combinatory narrative attributed to Ramon Lulle, explicitly laid out in an incredible prologue. Nine narrative themes (in principle autonomous, heterogeneous) are posed as the raw material of this combinatory: the story of a theology student of the past, seized by doubt; a thief who gets his hands on a kleptomaniac mirror capable of making anything that it reflects disappear; the confusions of the owner of a painting that is blessed with magic powers; the quest for twenty-two lambs and a Maltese Cross which, once put together, allow one to live in several worlds at the same time; a religious debate bearing on the conflict between grace (or predestination) and free will; two pirate ghosts searching for a treasure that, in a previous life, they hid too well; a present-day student who discovers, on the Internet, a site that predicts his immediate future; two separated lovers who meet in their dreams; and a young Iberian Catholic from a past century finding out that he’s Jewish (and the bearer of a ‘hidden name’) at the very moment that his father is taken away from him.
From there, the entire combinatory consists of making these cellular narratives cross each other’s paths, whether two by two or three by three, and also consecutively – each of these telescopings engendering, almost automatically, a specific narrative (one which logically implies that the characters can double or reincarnate themselves, leap time frames, and belong in several places at once).
Putting it another way: if there is an element of the fantastique in Ruiz, it is not the negation (or the excess) of a rational system, but literally produced by that system; fantasy comes initially from the nine chosen themes but, beyond that, each sequence obeys inviolable constraints, which only serve to intensify the fantastic.
Source : rouge.com
