With the indispensable aid of his widow and collaborator Valeria Sarmiento, the prolific Raúl Ruiz has given the world another film from beyond the grave. That might seem strange for some directors, but this partnering of living and dead is right on brand for the esoteric exile, whose films always operated in liminal spaces, obscuring the difference between dream and reality, night and day, conscious and unconscious. “The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror,” officially co-directed by Sarmiento and Ruiz (who passed in 2011), is the completion of footage shot by Ruiz in 1967 for what would have been his debut, but instead sat unfinished due to lack of funding for sound and was forgotten after Ruiz’s exile in 1973. While it’s often fair to question the motives of posthumous works (hologram Tupac comes to mind), Ruiz himself stated a desire to finish this film and it’s been carried out by Sarmiento, who was not only a lifelong collaborator with Ruiz (as editor and co-writer) but also directed many films of her own. After rediscovering the negatives a few years ago, Sarmiento completed the film by hiring lip readers to reconstruct the dialogue, using Ruiz’s notes to realize his intended (and unusual) structure, and hiring longtime collaborator Jorge Arriagada to write a soundtrack. The result is a wonderful combination of new and old; a film bearing the charm and originality of a first film whose themes and eccentricities can be seen in the context of a rich career.
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The titular widower of the story is Iriarte (Rubén Sotoconil), a literature professor reeling from the suicide of his wife. First, his torments are worse at night, when his sleep is haunted by an inescapable dream, always with the same motifs in the same order, “the sea, someone falling, the wigs, rivers of blood, the naked dead woman.” But soon, he starts seeing these dream visions during the day as well, as herds of feminine wigs scuttle around his room, he has conversations with his dead wife, and he finds himself obsessing over ominous headlines in the newspaper.
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Ruiz and Sarmiento intersperse the horror/fantasy elements of Iriarte’s nights with chatty dialogue scenes of the professor’s social life that could be taken out of the early Godard comedies of the time, wherein the professor’s distress is mostly ignored by his acquaintances, who are absorbed in their own preoccupations. While true of most Ruiz films, especially here he must rely on cheap, practical effects to convey an uncanny plot, mostly succeeding – instantly conveying ghostliness with just clever framing, unsettling the audience with off-kilter framings, and getting good mileage out of the later horror staple of slow, depraved nursery rhymes for a spooky atmosphere. Halfway, the film reaches a fulcrum point and the film begins a mirrored second half (including some David Lynchian reversed voices) that disturbs our assumptions about the professor’s present and past.
The (often unwanted) intrusion of dreams on waking life was a lifelong theme of Ruiz, but the elliptical narrative and notes of madness and sexual frustration especially recall “The Blind Owl.” While “The Tango of the Widower” does sometimes feel like a young film, like many Ruiz films it also feels timeless, totally untethered to the calendar or current events, but focusing on the eternal mysteries of the human heart and mind. This lovingly restored addition to his and Sarmiento’s body of work sheds light on his development as a filmmaker. [A-]
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