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The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror
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The great Raúl Ruiz (1941-2011), who was born in Chile
but spent much of his career based in France, is enjoying a busy after-life. In
league with the Chilean production company Poetastros, Ruiz’s widow Valeria
Sarmiento (herself a gifted filmmaker and editor) has devoted part of her
energy, in recent years, to completing his unfinished works.
It’s a trilogy: The
Wandering Soap Opera (2017), a delightful assemblage of scenes that Ruiz
shot with students in 1990, came first. Socialist
Realism, originally made in 1973 but almost never seen at its complete
length, will hopefully be unveiled in 2022.
In between, The
Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror presents the most unusual
case of the three. The Tango of the
Widower was a blackly comic horror-fantasy script that Ruiz shot in 1967 in
the context of a Chilean film club (the activities of which mixed passionate
viewing and amateur production) – he described it as “The Ghost and Mrs Muir as re-seen by Luis Buñuel”. It was designed to run for about
an hour.
The project, in that period, had to be abandoned. Ruiz
made his public, feature-length breakthrough a year later with Three Sad Tigers. But he long dreamed of
somehow resurrecting his surreal tango. The footage, however, took a long time
to resurface, only after his death. (By contrast, his first short, La Maleta [1960], popped up while he was
still alive to give it finishing touches.) And the sound recordings were
completely lost …
Resurrection is exactly what Sarmiento has given this
project – in the form of a revivification that is itself very ghostly and
unsettling. (I tell the truth: this film immediately entered my nightmares.)
Perhaps inspired by the mindboggling palindrome
exercise that Ruiz used to set his students – “create a scene that makes sense
when played both forwards and backwards” – Sarmiento has more-or-less
reconstructed the original film (with the help of expert lip-readers), before
flipping it (with various abridgements and soundtrack interventions) into
reverse motion.
The second half of the movie, therefore, is the
“distorting mirror” of the first. So this film by a dead man shows another dead
man spluttering back into life in order to return to his initial point of
looking upon the dead body of his wife whom he has probably killed … Let the
nightmares (re)begin!
But it’s also – as always with Ruiz– very funny, in
its dark and imaginative way. And Sarmiento has, ingeniously, both restored and
reinvented it.
MORE Ruiz: Dark at Noon, That Day, Three Lives and Only One Death, Time Regained, Three Crowns of the Sailor, Shattered Image, Of Great Events and Ordinary People, Mysteries of Lisbon, La noche de enfrente MORE Sarmiento: Amelia Lópes O’Neill © Adrian Martin August 2020 |
