Night Across the Street

An old man is sitting in an office at his desk. The office is a suite of rooms and the high-def video image lets us see through a doorway into another space where a secretary sits, sometimes laughing and sometimes weeping loudly. The colors are chalky pastel lit by diffuse light that seems to proceed from a sunset concealed behind layers and layers of watery dun-colored mist. The old man's boss says: "You have been utterly incoherent recently." The old man, Don Celso, the protagonist in Raul Ruiz' 2012 posthumously released film, says: "I have no ideas. I'm like a port without sea-gulls. The sea gulls have left me." Ruiz filmed "Night Across the Street" in Chile, the nation to which he returned to die of liver cancer after 40 years exile in Paris. The movie is valedictory, Ruiz' attempt to capture his life's great themes in a film structured like a complex, modernist poem, allusions and citations all held together by the picture's obsessively consistent color scheme and decor. Ruiz came from a family of seafarers and his hero, Don Celso, builds ships in bottles and walks with his friend, the French novelist, Jean Giono, through the harbor of his native Santiago. The sun is always setting and the streets are mostly empty and the high-def videography gives an objective, detached, scientific clarity to everything we see -- even though what we are shown is often dream-like and surreal. The camera glides like a ghost through empty rooms; fragments of old movies flicker on a screen. People whisper to one another like voices in your head, soft, insinuating, and motion is pinned against rear-projections that are impossibly clear and luminous --like paintings by Claude Lorrain with the urban landscape illumined by a great, empty glowing void. At the film's beginning, someone reads Proust on the soundtrack (Ruiz is the director of "Time Regained," the famous film version of the last volume of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time"), and Celso tells Giono that "time is stumbling along -- time is like marbles," that is, discrete colliding moments of recollection that don't quite cohere into a narrative. As a little boy, Celso named himself "Rhododendron," apparently, because he loved the sound of the word, and because he wasn't sure what it meant, and in his imagination he consorted with Long John Silver from "Treasure Island" (also a film made by Ruiz) and Ludwig von Beethoven. The camera stands like an old friend beside Celso as he encounters these figures and walks for a time beside them through funereal landscapes, the eroded and desolate coastline of Chile battered by the cold-looking green sea always underlying these episodes as a kind of "basso profundo" or counterpoint. "Night across the Street" is a great film and one that repays repeated viewings but it is also very slow, recollections congealed into a glacial mass of memory that scarcely moves and, like all great films, it contailns sequences of stupefying boredom, ennui that mirrors that an aspect of life that must also be allowed into the picture if a film is to be a truly encyclopediac representation of existence, the ambition, I think, of Ruiz' last movie. In this film, there is a hoax-plot involving a femme fatale and her lover's plan to murder the inhabitants of a boarding house where Celso lives, apparently to recover on Celso's insurance coverage -- this story is developed elliptically, like a slow-motion version of "Double Indemnity". Clearly, this sort of plotting is uninteresting to Ruiz, but he dutifully develops this aspect of the film, although so perfunctorily that this part of "Night across the Street" put me to sleep each time that I tried to watch the film -- as a result, I've seen this film four times, but only in fragments. Much of Ruiz' creative life was involved with transmuting the base stuff of popular novels and scandal-sheets into gold -- his great picture, "The Mysteries of Lisbon" is a 4 1/2 hour film of a best-selling Portuguese novel from the 19th century, dusty melodrama converted into something sublime and moving -- and the dull parts of "Night across the Street" seem to me intentionally dimwitted, stalled, even, paralyzed, an incursion of film noir into the most noir of subjects, a man's individual mortality. There is a massacre in the boarding house, a mysterious woman in tight pink pants on a bicycle, a seance, and a sequence set inside the barrel of the murder weapon, the characters moving slowly upward toward a light at the end of the gun-muzzle, radiance that Ruiz rejects when his hero retraces his steps sadly, like Dante or Orpheus without Eurydice, a melancholy pilgrim turning away from heaven to return to the gloomy sepia world of the boarding house, the airless offices where Celso spends his last week awaiting his retirement party, the dim chambers of the hero's memory that are filmed in ancient light stretched across the screen like parchment, The film is noteworthy for its visual aspect: mirrors in corners doubling the space of rooms that seem simultaneously vast, even epic, and confined, burnished interiors with women providing the only color in dim, crepuscular chambers, the movie's twilight color scheme increasingly strange as the film progresses, ending with bronze-tinted pinkish sepia, hues that don't exist in the real world and that become essentially indescribeable as the film draws toward its conclusion. Don Celso has the sense that the end is near. He is losing his grip on reality and living increasingly within memories and those memories, oddly enough for a film, are less pictorial than they are about words -- certain things that were spoken to him, phrases from poetry ineptly translated from Mallarme into Spanish, a seminar in diction, the voice of a crime muttering imprecations from within an unseen drain-pipe, the film ending not with an anticipated extravaganza of light and color -- perhaps,those besieged loess-yellow beaches crumbling under the blows of the sea -- but, instead, a dying note: the retirement party with its lame speeches and false emotion conducted in a 19th century room bathed in eerie metallic light, like reflections cast from old brass instruments.