![]() On Day 3, various pairs of spies descend on the same parked car and shoot each other while complaining about back pain and political manifestos. But other viewers may want to play along with Ruiz and his gifted cast members, most of whom deliver their bewildering lines with the sort of deadpan grace that made Leslie Nielsen's stone-faced performances in "Airplane" and the "Naked Gun" movies so funny. On Day 1, a romantic tryst is interrupted after an unnamed woman's husband shows up soon after her lover produces a lemon from his pocket ("When I heard the word 'lemon,' I felt it was my duty to come in.") On Day 2, a bureaucrat's dictation session takes a hilariously disruptive turn ("I'm not sure if 'superb' ends with a 'b' or a 'v'. By film's end, we see footage of Ruiz unceremoniously telling his crew that their project is complete he looks as dazed as I felt after watching 80 minutes of pure Ruiz-ian chaos.Īnd why not? "The Wandering Opera" may, understandably, annoy some viewers given its cryptic dialogue and fragmentary narratives. That mixture of excitement, confusion, and terror defines all six of the movie's vignettes, which are presented to viewers in order of the dates that Ruiz and his crew filmed them during their week-long shoot. "The Wandering Soap Opera" also sometimes feels like it was made by a filmmaker who doesn't understand where he is anymore. ![]() ![]() It often feels like the work of a newly-freed artist still processing what his freedom means given his (at the time) recently concluded exile from his home country (he had previously been exiled from Chile since 1973). You'll see shades of earlier surrealist filmmakers' work here (especially Luis Bunuel, but also Marco Ferreri), as well as familiar topics of discussion from Ruiz's earlier films.īut "The Wandering Soap Opera" is also a new film by Ruiz and not just because of its decades-late completion/release date. They talk over each other, eat with their mouths open, steal each other's spouses, shoot each other in the back, and then disappear (or re-appear) without warning or reason. Characters from various telenovela-like soap operas invade each other's worlds, though never in a sensible nor intuitive way. "The Wandering Soap Opera" is a typically synapses-frying transmission from Ruiz's subconscious, a movie that will probably seem foreign and impenetrable to even the most well-read Ruiz-ian scholars.
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