Raul Ruiz’s compendium of old sea stories, drawn from Dinesen, Andersen, Stevenson, and Conrad, and knitted together into a tale of wonderful complexity. Ruiz plays a game with the audience, challenging us to find the patterns within the film’s apparently arbitrary events, and then asking us to find the patterns that unite the patterns. Paradoxes build on paradoxes and logic on illogic, and yet the game has a serious end, building toward a world stripped of substance, in which everything signifies but nothing means. The visual style, based on Welles but with its own surprising directions, is just as imaginative. With Jean Bernard Guillard, Philippe Deplanche, and Lisa Lyon (1982).
