Tres tristes tigres

Worried about losing his job as a car salesman Tito takes his prostitute sister Amanda along to the apartment of his employer 'Rudy' as a kind of peace offering. But Rudy decides to get rid of Tito anyway leading to Tito giving Rudy a damn good fisting. Set in Santiago the Chilean feature film 'Three Sad Tigers' (shot in black and white and first released in 1968) is a French New Wave inflected social comedy drama with (middle) class themes and most notable as the first completed and released feature film of it's writer/director Raul Ruiz. As it's based on a play by Alejandro Sieveking (in turn based on a novel by Guillermo Cabrera Infante) the film's story, characters and dialogue are not exactly the film's strong points, but a rambling, stumbling, stupefying plot is (like some of it's often drunk characters), which staggers along all the way to the end. The title is based on a tongue twister which begins 'Three Tragic Tigers'.

Ruiz's first completed feature won him top prize at Locarno at the age of 28. This is a bleak and blackly humorous vision of a couple of hopeless losers' quotidian attempt to get by over a few days at the edges of Santiago de Chile's inebriated underworld of squalid strip joints and dingy apartments. Nelson Villagra and Shenda Román are both totally credible as an emotionally numb, mumbling brother-pimp-and-sister-whore "team" and Jaime Vadell is also great as Villagra's ambitious, frisky sometime boss. Organised semi-criminality and sweaty repressed frustration pervade the world of the film. Every conversation produces conflict and violence. (The military coup of 1973 is approaching - with unbridled neoliberalism to follow.) Formally, the film has little in common with Ruiz's later European work, but his trademark experimental play with language and music is already in effect. The hand-held b&w cinematography is rough-and-ready yet ambitious for a no-budget indie directorial debut made with the country's only Arriflex: the camera often seems like a spectator in these muscular, evidently meticulously choreographed long takes. The film bears comparison with Cassavetes' SHADOWS (1959) and FACES (1968), Iosseliani's ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A SINGING BLACKBIRD (1970) and even Scorsese's MEAN STREETS (1973). NADIE DIJO NADA (1971) was Ruiz's surreal, bohemian companion piece to TRES TRISTES TIGRES.

This movie is the best portrait of Chilean society. Ruiz show us like a group of little people with little problems, with a very special way of life. The strangest Spanish in all South American with the funniest accent too. This movie is like Martin Scorsese's Mean Street but without the crime ingredient. You must see it if you wanna know what's to be a Chilean, how you can feel believing that you're in the center of the world but actually living in the end, almost hanging from the continent. Raul Ruiz right now is living in Paris and making the most bizarre but fascinating films of the french production. "Tres tristes tigres" is very difficult to find but if you can, i tell you that you'll have a real gem.