City of Pirates (1984)

Dir. Raoul Ruiz

Nobody can say why you go chasing a pirate down

the street but such a state of affairs makes possible

a certain number of anxiety dreams. Was it the pirate,

you ask yourself, or was it the paranoia?

          

from 'When the privateers returned from their pillage' by Steve Spence

There is no Johnny Depp in eyeliner complaining about why the run's gone in City of Pirates, a film by the late Chilean director Raoul Ruiz, a film made to be intentionally difficult to gain cohesiveness over, nor are there galleons or people walking the plank. A pirate can denote something outside of law and order, and honestly, it's too literal and tedious to immediately go to Depp when the idea of a place suggesting pirates is far more mysterious and befitting this film's dreamlike structure.  Many viewers will complain that there are no actual pirates in the film, nor cities of any kind, dismissing the allegorical versions offered. Personally I wasn't disappointed, the lights that seasonally brighten up on a bush in a character's "Garden of Allegory" representing the ones readied for a war between pirates and the country of Spain, but some may be taken aback by the fact that this never becomes important for an overall narrative, merely detail in a world to add character, and that one should be concerned for the battle on this plant when its discovered Spain has lost.

I admit to finding the film a struggle to sit through in the beginning, but in dealing with the film, the issue of what I brought to it in terms of residue biases is part of the subject itself. Isidore (Anne Alvaro) comes into contact with Malo (Melvil Poupaud), a young boy who is in fact a killer, descending into a non linear trip that includes murder and an island where a man Toby (Hugues Quester), owner of the Garden of Allegories, has an entire family living in his head. It felt too close to the stereotype of pretentious art cinema originally. But befitting the film, either it was intentional, or that I fully absorbed the tone of it, and avoided forcing my own subconscious tagging by narrative cinema onto it.That Ruiz partially improvised the film, creating dialogue just before shooting scenes, was a dicey thing to do, in terms of how it would affect the tone of the work, and I'm still at the stage as a viewer, while falling in love with City of Pirates by the end, that the opening quarter of difficult films like this can frustrate me until I acclimatise to them. I've only seen four of Ruiz's films and one short, from a man who made over a hundred films, shorts and television work. As well as difficulty in actually seeing his films, including this one, sadly you can have critical writing be very vague when it comes to the maze-like nature of his work - like the key needed to unlock the mystery in the centre of his The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979), the description needed to entice you into Ruiz's world, rather than make it sound like obtuse navel gazing that'll put the casual viewer off being curious, is usually missing.

Yes, many viewers will find City of Pirates' completely disinterest with linear cohesiveness frustrating and dismiss it, but the film is far from obtuse. Again for a second review in a row I can reference Un Chien Andalou (1929), and how it was made with every rational idea purposely excised from the finished work. With City of Pirates, anything that connected together the content in terms of a narrative was removed during the editing process. Ruiz, and I dare stake this claim, in a film set by the ocean as depicted in lush almost candy-like colours - hazy burnt pinks, oceanic blues, blistering oranges - despite seeing little of his work, is an individual who suits the metaphor of the Chinese boxes well. Even if the conclusion is there by the end, the greater significance is that the route through the films seem to be continually expanding as you go along, and altering into more and more tangents as they go. Like the following too:

As a film, any plot for it boils down to the protagonist tagging along with the child as his "fiancée", after he (or likely she) has murdered her adopting father, only to be pushed into an increasing sense that she herself is hiding a more homicidal person within her. What the draw of the film is, the greater importance clearly, is how this is represented. It's worth remembering too that City of Pirates is a film that's playful in tone. A lot of my problems with the film disappear when the adoptive father leaves quite violently, in an unintentional shift in tone, or possibly on purpose. The beginning of the film is jarring against conventional norms of narrative cinema. A sentient white ball that bounces by itself, the mother talking to the dead, random appearance by policemen, and the one unfortunate aspect that was either Ruiz intentionally mocking pretence or something that flaws the film a little, the use of actors quoting very descriptive poetry. I'm not a fan of poetry where elaborate vocabulary for whole verses is common, rather than use of metaphors, grounded yet imaginative verse, or completely visionary or intentionally nonsensical wording choices. There is still the poetry in the rest of the film, usually in duelling voiceover, debating existence and life, but it's not as problematic. That the more irritating aspects of the dialogue were all quoted by the father, who is continually offering his adoptive daughter/live-in maid money as if soliciting sex behind his wife's back, it is the possibility that its intentional.

It becomes clearer than mood and fluxations of it drives City of Pirates, and what appears to be slight and close to pretentious drastically changes if one remembers what their dreams are like. Far from a cheap defence, it's a remainder to reconsider the context for viewing a film like this then the critical opinion. Dreams can have narratives, but they also dispense of any 'rationality' and inherently disregard notions of storytelling which required a 1-2-3 creation of characters and story. In this context, the film works perfectly. After a beginning stumble, it works as an increasingly darkening dream. One that is clearly humorous. One that has black humour and purely unconventional images. The most distinct, in the beginning, is the camera from inside the father's mouth, looking out between the teeth at his wife inspecting them.

City of Pirates

Instantly with this image, you should realise this is a deliberately absurd work. Especially if you use an example not from the film like this to emphasis the absurd camera shot -

Justin Quinnell's Smiley Cam Research Project

Large portions of the film are like this. The protagonist lost amongst a potential lover who offers her everything from radios to food, to Toby himself, where the mother of the family inside his head never heard from but only heard of from the other individuals juggled about from his consciousness. Surrounding this Ruiz is technically accomplished at making the shots seen have a distinction and a logical, tangible frame to house these illogical aspects. In dreams, the depth is gained from the resonance of the images and the events, not the background behind them. The meaning and emotions felt are already there for you beforehand as, in deep sleep or day dreaming, you are pulled away from the necessity of having a rationality to all that you encounter or sense. The difficultly one may have in trying to gauge with 'difficult' films, books and such materials could easily, possibly, maybe, be removed if you could go through them as one would encounter dreams in sleep. Maybe even the poetry I had a bugbear with may have made more sense in the film's place if I could have fully embraced the film in a resting state fully open to its content. The film's too deliberate in tone to be merely random, even if partially improvised, and the film's technical brilliance means that obvious motifs can exist which string together.

It's darker content reveals itself to be a fully darkened core to the work rather than mere shades to it. I can laugh and include the ridiculous juxtaposition of images just before, but parallel as well in City of Pirates is an incredibly uneasy film while still being tongue-in-cheek and playful. Nasty in its violence, the boy floating paper boats made of money in a river of a man's freshly split blood. Almost Italian giallo in its use of knives and blood spillage:

City of Pirates

Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975)

With Toby, despite a friendship taking place, his treatment of Isidore at first, locking her up in a prison cell, is immensely unsettling. When its changed into a friendly relationship, it's not a jarring and offensive shift. In dreams, opposites can sleep so much closer together while in the everyday the idea of them moving into being different and one-and-the-same equally is disturbing. The same applies to Malo, the killer boy, sarcastic but with the halo of a cherub. No wonder, when actor Poupaud grew up, you'd want to hug him in François Ozon's Time To Leave  (2005). But the boy is also a serial murderer and rapist. Later he takes on the status of a deity for murder, more of an entity. (Alarmingly Ruiz makes one of his names Peter Pan.) The childish innocence of the tone - pirates, bright colours - is hiding a tragic tale. A woman who lost romance, as she explains her backstory, and, in the symbolism, may be a killer as well. The film is open to interpretation. You can argue she's a mass murderer. Argue, with a shot of a man's face reflecting at her in a mirror, that it's the guilty of a man by proxy of his anima. That everyone's dead and this is purgatory as viewed as a coastal paradise of hazy, post-shooting highlighted, eighties colour coding. It's a not a cheat, a con, for Ruiz not to answer this, to be intentionally vague. His job here clearly was to make a waking dream. Dreams inherently have each viewer/listener of them making their own interpretations of what they mean.

There's always been a paradox in that, structurally, cinema is of audio and visual content. Even when either is removed, the lack of either and the sense of this takes up the gap left. However, the paradox, is that narrative is seen as more necessary within films. Narrative is not inherently of cinema, especially as editing, or lack thereof, is more of the connection of images in new meanings. Dreams are of the same idea. (So, fittingly, Sergei Eisenstein and Salvador Dali can exist in the same club house). Even if a narrative exists, like you wakes up naked in class on the day of an exam you haven't prepared for, my own experiences in dreaming have shown that the sensation of progression, through events, is more dictated by the effect of what happens than a story with a beginning, a middle and an end being shown. How narrative got to be the main priority in cinema is probably the result of theatre and novels influencing the material filmed, through either can remove it from themselves as well. Unfortunately, this means City of Pirates is seen as experimental because it negates the importance of narrative cohesion. My difficultly with the film at first is as much a subliminal printing of all the Hollywood films we see as children. This is important as I had difficulty writing this review - asking why I suddenly loved the film halfway through, when my mind originally was numb through the first quarter, and what I got from it when I loved viewing it. Sensations. The sense of dread, curiosity, wonder. The last image has stuck with me. Two women talking by a window. A man with a rotting face points a gun at the side of his skull. The women become skeletons even though without ligaments, muscle, a tongue or a vocal box they couldn't talk. Death. Unease.

A woman lost without love who'd likely slit her adopted father's throat for a lark and deep seated revenge against him. Her adopted mother doesn't care about the various murders, and still loves her. Death still existing from a child, completely against the notion of childhood innocence. Fittingly comparable to the last film I reviewed here - The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013). I know too Ruiz was an exile from Chile when it became a dictatorship. When Isidore is imprisoned, was that on his mind? Yet he's still playful. A white ball, clearly on a string above, being spun around the mother's head as if possessed by the dead feels too whimsical on purpose to be a fault tonally. There is no need for Ruiz to have to divide this from the serious side of the film, as the viewer should themselves and the film is structured so these abrupt parings make sense together. The conscious structure of these irrational pieces was ignored by me at first, which I regret when I finally noticed and understood them. Rather than hold one's hand, the film lets you feel when you react to individually in seeing said images. With this film in particular, it emphasises for me the absurdity of letting narrative being a driving force when images and sound are the more important factors for a film. That, and as taking its cues from dreams, it already possesses a cohesiveness, but that cohesive structure belongs from something, dreaming, where the rational to have something explain all of itself to you, rather than take from it what you can, is literally asleep and not allowed to be involved in experiencing the dreams. With City of Pirates the point is to experience the sense of dreaming it. The try and make a narrative out of it makes little sense to do and is patronising to it and yourself.

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Images, in order, from the following sources:

1. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zlc81EWkeDU/TKedkC6nJdI/AAAAAAAABFU/jyKLN328ND0/s1600/vlcsnap-2010-10-02-15h55m18s148.png

2. http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/7813/ruiz5qu7.jpg

3. http://www.utopia-britannica.org.uk/Assets/maze.jpg

4.  http://dcairns.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/vlcsnap-197666.png

5. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/

-bbwrZ9IoKEA/TzLR1daBeII/AAAAAAAAAC0/wm_XH2UcfZU/s1600/Screen+shot+2012-02-08+at+11.08.56+AM.png

6. http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image11/cityofpirates06.jpg

7. http://cdn.filmschoolrejects.com/images/deep-red.jpg

8. http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/post_images/6403/city%20of%20pirates.png?1314026129

9. http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/cityofpirates-window-red2.jpg