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"Raúl Ruiz's films are zesty experiments in elaborate esoteria, the more obscure the better. Just one of the four movies he cranked out in 1982, this humid head-scratcher (subtitled "A Film About Survival") encases a rich barrage of ideas in the skin of a mock fable, set in a vaguely futuristic parallel universe. The plot follows a Dutch anthropologist couple (Jean Badin, Willeke van Ammelrooy) who bump into "communist millionaire" Fernando Bordeu at the Malcolm X Hotel and accept an invitation to his island manor in Patagonia to chart the linguists of the last two survivors of a massacred tribe -- while Badin loses himself in studying and eventually domesticizing the natives (whose language, reinvented daily, consists of sixty words with roughly a hundred different inflections each), Ammelrooy and Bordeu forge their own Last Year in Marienbad love connection. Mirrors get buried and tongues get cut before the film reaches its nonconclusion,...