News

I can’t think of a better start to the Berlin Film Festival than Raúl Ruiz’s The Tango of a Widower and its Distorting Mirror (1967/2020), an eerie, imaginative story about a despotic professor, haunted by the ghost of his deceased wife, and which is also a tribute to experimental cinema. The film was to be Ruiz’s debut feature, but he never completed it. Ruiz’s widow, Valeria Sarmiento, who was also behind the completion of Ruiz’s other celebrated posthumous project, The Wandering Soap Opera (2017), effectively became its co-director.The film’s plot is quite simple, perhaps even schematic. A renowned professor (Rubén Sotoconil) sees his nightmarish dreams infect reality, assailed by her image in daylight. Wigs move around his apartment—surrealist, sensual, tormenting. In one dream, his nephew removes a wig from his body, as if he just gave birth to it. There’s plenty here to create tension,...