Romance! Vengeance! Pirates! Don’t let the running time put you off, this sprawling, Dickensian Bildungsroman marries the narrative sweep of the best TV to the artistry of a cinematic master operating at the top of his game. Raúl Ruiz’s mesmerising epic is what weekend afternoons were made for.
Tall tales are exhumed from the drunken fog of memory in this hallucinatory maritime adventure in storytelling from Raúl Ruiz. The fractured narrative design and dazzling, poetic visuals lend the destabilizing sense of being at sea, albeit in a vessel clearly being steered by a cinematic master.
A series of dreamily interconnected vignettes whose characters find themselves in all types of absurd situations combining melodrama and fantasy. The antics of soap archetypes like adulterers and femme fatales are treated with irony, resulting in some satirical commentary on Chilean politics.
On the verge of a forced retirement, an elderly office worker begins to relive real and imagined memories from his life, from conversations with Long John Silver to cinema trips with Beethoven to a brief stay in a haunted hotel. All the while, a sinister end appears to be closing in…
