La ville des pirates

It's a shame that Raoul Ruix's film is currently unavailable on DVD or Blu Ray. City of Pirates is a beautiful and simultaneously unsettling film that is quite unlike anything I've ever seen before.

The film works on different levels. It works as a childlike adventure as well as a surrealist horror film. City of Pirates feels like a dream both in terms of plot and visuals. As a result the film casts a hypnotic spell on the viewer.

There is an underlying sense of loss and tragedy to the main character which I found added a layer of sadness to the whole film. One of the best aspects of City of Pirates is the visuals. I can't think of any other films that look like it. There are many striking shots that linger in your memory long after the film is over.

In conclusion, I'd highly recommend City of Pirates. It's a film deserving of far more attention than it earns. The film is free on YouTube with English Subtitles.

I just came back from the International Film Festival of Rotterdam and saw La ville des Pirates in a retrospective about Ruiz's work. Why didn't I know about this man and his sheer genius? This film has the quality of a Godard or a Truffaut.... Or better yet...He is another Bunuel! His surrealistic tale about the adventures of a young woman regaining her balance in a disturbed world is mind-blowing. So powerful, witty, intellectual and colorful.

Mr. Ruiz I salute you

Having just finished watching this movie for the third time on a recently released in France DVD, I feel an obligation to recommend this movie wholeheartedly and unreservedly to any movie buff. The sheer visual brilliance of this oeuvre will retain your imagination for many days to come, let alone the mesmerizing and murderous child who eats nothing but garlic. Granted, the movie's plotline is very uneven - but then Mr. Ruiz was writing the next installment of the script the day before shooting it. Two crews were working on this film: one filming the actors and another one patiently waiting for the appropriate view of the island and the sea. An artist was employed to paint on a glass through which the sea was shot (all this information is narrated by Mr. Ruiz himself in a bonus interview on the DVD). The camera work is characteristically virtouso, with elaborate long shots that defy all laws of possibility and very impressive editing.

Man, would I love to see this film again! The problem is, it has seemed to disappear completely; never shown in theaters or at festivals anymore, never shown on European television. I saw it twice, many years ago, and can't remember much detail, let alone a story-line if there is any. Ruiz' film is a gallery of stunning images, woven together to make a surrealistic masterpiece. A woman sleepwalking through a moonlit mediterranean village; a man on a terrace eating lunch, the camera inside his mouth. And best of all: a kitchen-scene in which someone opens a window and you can actually feel the temperature dropping. A wonderful wonderful film, but i don't know why. Isn't that the essence of all great art? Would I love to see this film again!

For obvious reasons I was expecting something that toyed with elements of the swashbuckler, perhaps in a surreal manner. Not a thing. No pirates here, certainly not a city of them.

All the other reviews available here denote the visual exuberance; indeed, Ruiz graces us with a feast, a magical lantern of imposing colors and impossible angles. We may find Welles or Robbe-Grillet somewhere in this, others thought of Bunuel.

What greatly appeals to me in all this is the raw, tangible feel where the traces of the creative endeavor are burrowed in the work itself, suggesting both the spontaneous joy of conceiving them out of thin air and the carpenter's puzzling over how to construct them from bare essentials. So that a bouncing ball denoting in a seance the presence of spirits, suggests the filmmaker's hand that holds it by the string. Far-reaching vision, conceived by intimate means.

So this seems to be the cinematic mode that Ruiz favored in the 80's; dreamy, oblique narratives that transport to the folds of the imaginative mind. Except the mist here is thicker than previously, as everything (or nearly everything) takes place in the mind.

What events set this thing in motion on the level of reality reach us down here in the mind as fantastical echoes. We experience all of this vaguely, internally, as the faint repercussions of some violence bubbling at the far surface.

Still, the trained eye will likely come out of this with some idea or sense of what transpired.

We have a young adopted woman, who is on the receiving end of her stepfather's sexual advances (he "lulls her to sleep" with money), who probably retreats into an imaginative flight that takes her to the "isle of the pirates". She discovers a kid who has in turn murdered his family, an inner kid also lost and fleeing, also in need of affection. She falls in love with a man who talks to her of love as the Holy Spirit, burning, hurting, and whom we later see has grown distant, offering to buy her a radio when all she wants is "all that he has".

The first hour of this is some of the most sublime stuff ever. Joyful, sorrowful, strangely ominous (there is a seance and talk of a dead boyfriend. constables show up on the doorstep to deliver portents of doom), characters sing, cameras dance. Ruiz juggles remarkably the various moods, dream to nightmare. The opening is like out of Godard, with aloof characters in a seaside villa alluding to forgotten meanings through vague soliloquys. Once they reach the isle of the pirates it looses steam though, which is a recurring thing with Ruiz. His films often feel to me longer than they should. While his filmmaking is immersive, with the ability to take us places, it is often dragged down by the heavy allegories.

Stick with it though, because the final image is one to cherish. It starts like this; two hooded figures of women sit before an open window looking out to sea, and one of them is pointing out somewhere, where a shadow is rising. It takes my breath away just to recall it.