Raúl Ruiz and the anthology film—a match so perfect it’s a wonder the Chilean director’s first came 30 years into his career. Ruiz’s affinity for the pleasures of yarn-spinning were a constant of his work, with the filmmaker’s famous maxim that he did not make fiction films, but “films about fiction,” manifesting itself in the digressive narrative structures of his most celebrated films from the ‘80s: Three Crowns of the Sailor (1982) and City of Pirates (1983). Three Lives and One Death (1996), by contrast, features four distinct but intersecting tales, each featuring Marcello Mastroianni (in the actor’s penultimate role) as different characters who may or may not be iterations of the same man.
The first, in which Mastroianni plays a man who returns to his wife after a 20-year disappearance, is liberally adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Wakefield.” The story itself is distinguished by its metafictional qualities, as Hawthorne begins by identifying the tale as a work of imagination based on his remembrances of a newspaper article detailing a similar occurrence. In line with Ruiz’s rejection of what he called “Central Conflict Theory”—the idea that conflict is necessarily the engine of narrative storytelling—his version of the story refuses to progress from its arresting hook according to traditional cause-and-effect logic. When Mastroianni announces his intention to return and buries a hammer in the forehead of his wife’s new husband, the man responds by opening a newspaper and agreeing to the situation while lightly chastising his assailant.
What Ruiz offers in place of conflict are not just clever and indulgent narrative tinkers, but expressive experiments in the construction of identity through fiction. Actors, characters, and objects from one story begin to resurface in others, as the film’s form appropriately becomes increasingly refractive. Ruiz employs his usual array of split-screens, diopters, silhouettes, foregrounded objects, and liquid camera movements, making the images themselves as rife with authorial manipulation and redolent of mystery as the stories they tell. One key image—a split-screen of Mastroianni on one side and his reflection on the other—also marks the film as a study of the actor’s iconic screen image. The star’s presence points to Ruiz’s increasing acceptance in the arthouse and festival circuits during the ‘90s, which would culminate with the lavish Proust adaptation Time Regained (1999). Three Lives finds Ruiz working in a relatively accessible mode without diluting the density of ideas embedded in his filmmaking.
When Mastroianni’s Sorbonne professor, from the second story, suddenly decides to throw away his life and live as a vagrant, he’s simply swapping his refined upper-class image for that of the noble street urchin—one that the star inhabits just as successfully in the world of the film because, for some reason, every single passerby on the street is compelled to give him money. By the time the young lover from the third story—played by Mastroianni’s daughter Chiara—reappears in the fourth to inform Mastroianni that her character is his character’s daughter, we’re firmly in the hall-of-mirrors territory that Ruiz later expanded upon with the dizzying Love Torn in a Dream (2000). The idea that identities are built from images and stories feels personal to Ruiz, an artist who spent a lifetime thinking through the aesthetics and politics of both. It’s no surprise that cinema’s greatest poet of exile should make his subject a character so lost in fiction that he nearly becomes, in Hawthorne’s story, “The Outcast of the Universe.”
Three Lives and Only One Death screens this afternoon, December 21, at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the series “MoMA and Cinecittà Present: Marcello and Chiara Mastroianni, A Family Affair.”
