Jesse

Even with great set design and cinematography, this muddle of a mystery will leave many questions and confusion, long after it's over. Good, dual character arcs for both William Baldwin and Annie Parrilaud; however, neither seem to connect with the final denouement.I kept hoping I would understand the final outcome, but still remain unsure of what it all meant.It has a Hitchcock/De Palma/Shayamalan director's twist, but it doesn't seem to tie up all the loose ends.It is recommended, however, for anyone interested in post-traumatic stress syndrome, abnormal psychology, or readers of 19th century author,William James.

This is the third Raoul Ruiz film I have watched recently (after "Three Lives and Only One Death" and "Genealogies of a Crime"), and it is easily the best of the three. Why? Because it's less talky and pseudo-philosophical, more colorful and cinematic. Imaginatively directed and sprinkled with all sorts of quirky visual surprises (some of which are directly linked to its title) and surreal ideas (a painting that gets different every time you look at it), it captures the netherworld between dream and reality better than any "Nightmare on Elm Street" movie. And if all the pieces of the puzzle don't fit together at the end (though a second viewing will help you clear up a few details), at least you can feel the director's joy in assembling them anyway. (***)

One of the the things you can do as a new director is to get a great Director of Photography. He can help you avoid mistakes and save your butt.

Raoul Ruiz is not a new director, he has over 90 films to his credit, but he is fairly new to the United States. This is supposed to be his "official" debut film.

So, he gets Robby Müller to do the cinematography. Great choice, as directors like Wim Wenders (13 times, including Paris Texas) and Jim Jarmunch (Ghost Dog, Way of the Samauri) like to use him on their pictures.

Unfortunately, the great cinematography and a sexy star, Anne Parillaud (La Femme Nikita, Innocent Blood), can't make up for lousy music and bad "B" movie dialog, even if the story is somewhat interesting. Yes, I hung in there to see what happens, and, no, I am still not sure.

It did have Graham Greene (Die Hard with a Vengeance, The Green Mile) and that made it more palatable through the bad parts.

Don't rent, but you may want to catch it on cable.

I think a crucial point in developing an individual taste for cinema is to be able to unwaveringly focus on the things that we feel personally matter. To coast without distraction through the small handicaps that hamper and limit a film in pursuit of the spark of creative vision (assuming one such that matters to us exists). This is to be able to enjoy Argento for who he is rather than in spite of his storytelling deficiencies.

One such thing we have here. A package that looks from a distance as straight-to-video fodder as vehicle for an almost recognizable name, acting that is ho-hum, stilted dialogue. The reward for a casual watcher catching this on latenight TV might be simply to cope a smile at William Baldwin playing actor.

I come to this for the filmmaker though with his potent notions about convergent realities and fictions passing as real, as part of my quest on Raoul Ruiz. Coming from two films he did back in France, both crushingly dry and tedious, for his American debut he reverts back to the heady magic he weaved in his 80's stuff. Soaking in colors, strange portents, frames that become real; a reality hung askew from which we are transported back and forth into the folds of the imaginative mind.

The scaffold: two women (played by Anna Parillaud) as figments of the one damaged mind, each in her separate reality dreaming up the other. Transitions between the two worlds, mostly through sex or objects as mirrors (an acquarium, a painting, even -rather painfully obvious- the frame of what we're watching shattering into shards).

So there is one subconscious where all the hurt is arranged into a wish-fulfillment fantasy (the woman plays a contract killer paid to kill men, eventually discovers the target she falls in love with to be innocent), and the conscious mind in the other plane trying to cope with the anxieties of a situation real or imagined (as seeping back from the dream and flowing into it). It is all about this cinematic flow of a nightmare that renews itself - a half-way intelligent device, perhaps squandered under the auspice of something for latenight cable.

Then there is the ending, no doubt imposed upon Ruiz by producers demanding some solid ground for their audience. It all makes sense eventually, what was real and what not. Again we may disregard this.

This is one of those movies. Despite the agony, I hung in there for 40 minutes, but I could take no more. I guess everyone has their limits. This movie was incredibly bad! What were the people who made this movie thinking?