Night Across the Street (Raul Ruiz) [23 points / 2 votes]
"It feels wrong to think of Night Across the Street, Chilean director Raoul Ruiz's final film, as a mature work by a master filmmaker. Based loosely on Hernan del Solar's novel, Night Across the Street is a typical Ruiz film in that it's a magically realistic reverie about the fluidity of time and memory. In Night Across the Street, memories, like people, are marbles. They're designed to collide into each other, though Ruiz is still not sure who is the active player in this metaphor: the author, his characters, his friends and family, or whoever/whatever God is (perhaps a"phantom puppeteer?").
That image is one of many that Don Celso (Sergio Hernandez) toys with before he retires from his menial job as a clerk. At the end of his life, he rejects the notion death ends everything. Even inanimate objects, like alarm clocks and guns, have memories that are jogged by arbitrary triggers, like the word "Rhododendron" that excites Don Celso so much.
Celso's memories aren't miniature ships to be kept separate in bottles. They're more like the movies of his youth, shadows that come to life and change every time he watches them. When he rewatches these films, Celso doesn't remember how they'll end, but simply takes pleasure in seeing them come to life again. He similarly has conversations with Long John Silver and Beethoven and puzzles over the meaning of mistranslated poetry. And he flirts with death, wondering, or perhaps demanding, that some mysterious assailant suddenly appear and take his life.
So Night Across the Street is necessarily the work of an older artist. Compare it with an earlier Ruiz film, like City of Pirates, and you'll see that memories, myths, and real people are no longer competing with each other for validity. There's no struggle here, just an impassioned sigh about how necessarily confusing and exciting the passage of time can be at the end of life. Don Celso accepts his own powerlessness and confusion, and is consequently overwhelmed by beauty." -- Simon Abrams
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