Raúl Ruiz
La Ville des Pirates

“Some afternoons I would like to embark and leave without a destination and silently distance myself from any port, as the day dies.”

Already underway since the late 1960s and defined over the following decade, the cinema of Raúl Ruiz forcefully imposed itself on the consciousness of the international critics when recognized by Cahiers du cinéma with the special issue of March 1983. That was the year of the double feature that would consecrate him in the eyes of cinephiles worldwide as one of the most peculiar and innovative authors of the seventh art: that of Three Crowns of the Sailor and City of Pirates.

The viewing of La Ville des Pirates (a programmatically misleading title accompanied by the Latin subtitle Rusticatio Civitatis Piratarum) is an experience with few equals in the cinematic field and is imprinted in memory with the power and nebulous clarity of dreamlike matter that survives wakefulness. It is evidently a cinema of surreality, which aims to reproduce the irrational dynamics—or rather, governed by an intrinsic and autonomous system of principles—of the dream process, unfolding by stringing together images and sounds through free associations, formal affinities, distant semantic similarities, and daring flights of fancy. The film thus presents itself as a captivating hypnagogic vision with slow and seductive rhythms, a refined dance of hypnotic and intangible forms punctuated by whispers and murmurs spoken softly. The cryptic darkness and hermeticism of the adopted language, up to the esoteric limit, the labyrinthine structure that lacks a solid central pivot, the overflowing artistic and literary citationism, and the profusion of symbols, metaphors, allegories, and emblems make it an enigmatic and fascinating work, imbued with an aura of arcane mystery with a Borges-like quality.

Let’s try to gradually dissect the multitude of references and models underlying the film and its imagery. First of all, there are explicit citations to historical and/or literary characters: Dorian Gray, Atahualpa, Philip II of Spain, Don Sebastian King of Portugal, Egill Skallagrímsson, Peter Pan, Michael Strogoff, Hotu Matu’a, which already outline a varied and composite imaginary where the Hispanic element appears predominant. Specifically, the reference is to the Iberia of the late sixteenth century, which was heading towards economic-political decline following the wave of the discovery of America and then the defeat of the Invincible Armada, but in the meantime, it was living the cultural splendor of the late empire of the Siglo de Oro. The entire film is indeed permeated by a decadent and melancholic atmosphere, nostalgic for a once-flourishing past now lost and resigned to the inevitable cyclical passing of ages. The first words we hear whispered offscreen—“Ouvre la porte. Il est de retour.”—against the backdrop of a stormy sea, amid the cries of seagulls, immediately introduce this nostalgic feeling: a feeling traceable to the typically Galician-Portuguese concept of saudade. The overvoices that will retrospectively comment on every event from the perspective of death will keep this feeling vivid for the rest of the film, as will Jorge Arriagada’s splendid scores and the numerous songs sung by the characters, among which stands out the poignant J’ai deux amours by Joséphine Baker.

The sixteenth century—Spanish and otherwise—also returns on the figurative level, among precise crypto-citations (e.g., Arcimboldo in a head peering from behind vegetables) and a general Mannerist taste discernible in the tendency to deform the viewpoint and in heightened chromatic and luministic sensitivity. The shots of City of Pirates are true pictorial works meticulously crafted: the composition reaches unprecedented levels of inventiveness and virtuosity, with the camera positioned in the most unexpected places (from inside a mouth outwards, from under the floor upwards, etc.), the arrangement of elements within the frame according to unusual schemes and perspectives (close-up details interacting with background elements, using depth of field that would make Welles’ work look pale) and equally bizarre camera movements (a side tracking shot following the detail of a backlit hand holding an egg!), while a chameleonic photography experiments with the most diverse expressive solutions, ranging from livid metallic blacks and whites to grainy pastel shades, from the liquid and watercolor effect of certain seascapes to the sparkling embroidery and blurring of many close-ups, to the glaring shifts and hypersaturated colors that inflame the most surreal sequences. The film’s figurative horizon thus triggers an iconographic short circuit among the most heterogeneous components: El Greco and Tintoretto, but also Leonardo da Vinci, Turner, Constable, Expressionism (consider the insistent use of silhouettes projected on walls) and, of course, Surrealism, which finds precise iconographic correspondence in the recurring wide-open windows onto the sea à la Magritte.

As for being a surrealist film, City of Pirates doesn’t limit itself to developing an anti-narrative, illogical, and etiological structure mimicking dream dynamics, proceeding by free associations (one examples being the phantom Pirate Island first identified by a kiss imprinted on a cheek and then a piece of brain in a pool of blood) or flaunting arcane symbologies (the Island itself, the bishop’s ring, the battle in the allegorical garden), but even recovers the techniques of unconscious emergence devised and experimented by the surrealist avant-garde of the 1920s, such as automatic writing or the game of cadavre exquis, proving to be much more radical in this respect than the analogous experiences of surrealist cinema matured in the slightly preceding period (the ex-members of the Panic Movement Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal, David Lynch) and directly connecting to Breton’s theorizing and their application to cinema by the Dalí-Buñuel duo at the dawn of sound. There is no dialogue in the film that unfolds on the tracks of ordinary and rational communication; words seem to surface from hidden and buried depths and often resolve into chains of pure nonsense: sequences such as the one recounting the story of Atahualpa are exemplary in this regard. Here’s a sample of some of the most significant parts:

“Heart of snow. Nitrate of ultramarine. Haruspex of other wombs. Lapis lazuli of my dark circles. Salty fires of my pyres. Warm, treacherous stomach cyclones. Atrocious sweetness of comets made of the rose of tacit speech. Pulverized metrics of the dead season of eastern dovecotes. Errant dome of the emancipated and mercurial boat. Nasal metronome of the menstrual vespers of hospital blue. Calcined cosmogony of my Bacchic and lazy fingers. All of my all. Nothing of my nothing. Livid sacrificial meal. Watchtower of my Alhama. Bridegroom of the Macarena.”

The logic underlying these arbitrary juxtapositions fully responds to the surrealist aesthetic of the fortuitous and immediate meeting “on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella,” according to the words of one of the movement's main inspirers, the Count of Lautréamont. But Raúl Ruiz takes it a step further. In several moments it becomes apparent how the word is used not so much for its meaning but as mere tonal value, simple sound capable of evoking. When the overvoices overlap in an inextricable and incomprehensible sound blend, or conversely, the Island’s echo obsessively excoriates and fragments Isidore’s words, their semantic component dissolves into pure sound, leaving room only for an insensible grammelot. This phonetic predominance will then serve as a general rule, in tune with the taste for sound eccentricities deriving Surrealism from its pataphysical ancestry (also in one point the Jarryesque “Merdre!” is quoted).

With this in mind, here are some plot notes, as far as possible. The action is set in an unspecified place and time—“In the Territories Overseas, a week before the end of the war”—essentially a non-place and a non-time defined by vague and confused chronotopic references: a semi-deserted coastal locality (of French language but Hispanic culture) in which echoes of a distant and unspecified war resonate. In this suspended and decadently melancholic atmosphere, we are introduced to the protagonist Isidore (Anne Alvaro), suffering from some unknown disease and tormented, in the grip of an acute form of saudade that leads her to gaze at the horizon and nostalgically recall a distant past love: her past will only be hinted at later. With her live two adoptive parents, who seem resigned to the greyness of existence, particularly the father's exacerbation and disgust with life. During a séance to contact their son, who drowned at age ten, they are visited by two ambiguous gendarmes searching for a missing child named Malo. Isidore finds him at home repeatedly and forms a growing bond that turns into an actual engagement with a ring. The child (Melvil Poupaud) immediately shows offbeat peculiarities: he appears and disappears into thin air, shows some malice and maturity, never sleeps, eats only garlic (?). Soon after, we discover that he has perpetrated the heinous massacre of his entire family, but despite this, Isidore agrees to let him guide her to a phantom Pirate Island, after helping him commit two more murders. Once on the island, Isidore loses track of the child and is abducted by Toby (Hugues Quester), a man with a multiplied personality impersonating each deceased family member in turn, like a Norman Bates on steroids. He keeps her confined in a ruined fort, shows her his allegorical garden, and eventually makes her his consort and queen. Isidore manages to flee from the castle and finds Malo on the island's cliff, learning that ten years earlier a similar crime had occurred: incited by the Mephistophelean-child, Isidore kills Toby and then leaves the island. Finally, two gendarmes reveal to her that the marvelous child is none other than an incarnation of their prophet, Don Sebastian, the king of the pure, who reappears every ten years in the world by massacring his family to teach humans to die and kill, in a sort of cosmic purifying palingenesis. So we discover that Isidore is pregnant and carries within her the future avatāra of Don Sebastian, who, ten years later, along with her deformed and animalistic son Sebastian, returns to the Island of Pirates to carry out the necessary sacrifice for the succession of the ages: having found Malo (who has taken on Toby’s features), Isidore incites her son to kill him since he is his father and then allows herself to be killed too. The enigmatic violet-tinted concluding sequence finally sees on stage, with their backs turned toward the sea, the figures (Isidore and her mother post mortem?) that have commented on the whole film as off-screen voices, often against the backdrop of suggestive stormy seascapes. We hear them still whispering hermetic phrases imbued with metaphysical melancholy, while a decomposing man advances menacingly, aiming a gun at his temple: whereupon the two figures turn, showing scraped skulls instead of their faces. The film closes at the necessity of eternal return, with the umpteenth arising of Don Sebastian on the horizon:

“Look. Again. My God. How long will it last? Patience. Everything restarts. Sometimes I say to myself that childhood must be this. Living and reliving, only for all these enormities. Patience, mom. Patience, my daughter. Everything restarts. We are…here…we are…here…we are…here…we are…here…we are…here…”

The final scene appears to be set in a desolate limbo suspended between worlds and ages (the afterlife?) and evokes the chthonic figures of the Moirai/Fates of classical mythology, who in the underworld spun the destinies of men and cosmos. But the range of mythological and anthropological archetypes and narrative topoi touched upon by the film is far wider. Consider the character of Don Sebastian, who (besides the historical and operatic reference to the “hidden” King of Portugal) encompasses the characteristics of the trickster, Demiurge, Mephistopheles, Christ, and Viśnu/Ṣiva, colliding and fusing Gnosticism, Christian eschatology, and Hinduism - whose presence is more substantial than it appears at first glance if one considers the film's final words, almost an invocation for the definitive breaking of the saṃsāra cycle and the attainment of mokṣa. Consider again the multiple narrative genres that disguise the dream-like dimension of the plot: mythological narration, fairy tale, allegorical tale, adventure novel, gothic novel, feuilleton, detective story. If indicating a predominant model, Barrie’s Peter Pan can undoubtedly be cited—as the film explicitly presents itself as an auteur’s remake of it: if Malo is Peter Pan, Isidore is Wendy, and the Island of Pirates the Never Land that isn’t.

In a declaredly surrealist film, where one unwittingly encounters suicide-induced somnambulism by money’s soporific power, “obedient as planets” balloons levitating, and grotesque games of bullfighting played with a many-personalitied player’s skull, it is not very wise to attempt systematic interpretations, which run the risk of inevitably being partial and reductive. Therefore, I will limit myself to proposing only a daring reading attempt at a plot level, given that surrealistic logic doesn’t necessarily presuppose the absence of textual coherence. In particular, what is the relationship between Isidore, Malo, and Toby, the main characters of the film? They appear deeply linked by only lightly hinted but substantial consonances and counterpoints, as if they were distorted reflections of each other in a shifting mirrors game. The most evident bond is established between the malo child and the doubled man: both have a disappeared family behind them (in both featuring the name of a colonel), both see Isidore as a chosen companion, and when she tells her story, they appear disinterested, flipping through a newspaper’s pages—a near-identical reiteration of the same scene. But especially, in the prefinale, Malo has taken on the appearance of the late Toby: they are evidently the same person, i.e., two successive (or perhaps co-present?) incarnations of the prophet Don Sebastian. Toby would thus be the author of the massacre ten years earlier, and its trace remains in his prismatic personality (Hitchcock docet). But Isidore herself evokes more than one affinity with them: orphaned at five under unknown circumstances, she caused the loved one's suicide (perhaps the mysterious man from the final scene?), experiences an exchange/fusion process with Toby in the allegorical garden and above all, in what seems a full-fledged epiphany, upon requesting to reveal who is accountable for the massacre, Malo tells her to look in the mirror, and Isidore sees Toby’s face reflected.

With City of Pirates, Raúl Ruiz signs an imposing and infinitely complex work, a “centerless labyrinth”—to borrow the expression Borges used to describe Citizen Kane in 1941—capable of disorienting and profoundly unsettling the viewer, a cerebral waking dream that actually conceals a very clear philosophical reflection on the inherent fatigue in the eternal rewinding of cosmic cycles, a masterful stylistic and formal tour de force with few precedents in cinema history, an obscure enigma impossible to interpret fully. Even for just this one work, Raúl Ruiz would deserve a privileged place in the pantheon of cinema’s greats, while his name is unfortunately today known only to the restricted circle of enthusiasts and insiders, despite his arrival in the mainstream with his latest films. 9