Tres vidas y una sola muerte

Great dark humour, very funny, felliniesque film. Mastroianni is as good as always. A tad confusing at times. Requires complete attention at all times. The ending is the best part, a very clever film.

With his work in the 80's Ruiz managed to cast upon the French conundrums about time and reality an oblique, dreamlike light. A light that diffused the essay into heady magic, into shadow play that was dangerous and sultry with the impossible. He would see Welles from the other side of the mirror, from the fictional looking in.

None of that here, instead dry vignettes like a French Bunuel. Some wit and irreverence and a few touches about convergent realities that remind of his earlier films are lost in too much transparence.

The structure is reminiscent of something he would do. A surreal comedy where Marcello Mastroyanni is three different characters. All three stories are framed by a narrator reading them for a radio program. Eventually the three lives converge, worlds overlap under a single author who weaves himself in fictions that inexplicably become real, but they converge and overlap too late and no real sparks fly.

Whereas earlier Ruiz trusted intuition to take him to the place where ideas mean things, here he starts from ideas and structures as he goes on. It is all scaffold, elaborate, suffocating scaffold, with no edifice to support. Ideas cast adrift without anchor. Compare with the richness of his 80's films about sailing inwards.

This is a strange and unsettling film that left me feeling both disturbed and intrigued. The film follows the story of a man named Mateo who appears to die three times, only to come back to life with a different identity each time. The writing in this film is superb, with complex characters and a storyline that keeps you guessing until the very end.

What is truly remarkable about "Three Lives and Only One Death" is the way that it encourages multiple viewings. Each time you watch it, you discover something new about the characters or the story, and you begin to see connections between different moments that you may not have noticed before. The film also has a surrealistic, dreamlike quality to it that further adds to its unsettling nature.

Wonder how many of his wives and lovers found themselves in this film. He is old and splits off into many diverse personalities: and does so quite successfully. The fairies are a little hard to take. However, one of the wildest roles is the one by msieu Doucard, that evil French spy in the Sharpe movies. With overalls, he plays a simple Frenchmen who meets a really wierd end at the hands of Mastroiannani. The actor is too intelligent, though, and he didn't quite hide his intelligence as well as say, Billy Bob Thornton in his similar role. In other words, you don't buy that Msieu Doucard would be so gullible, or is that the shadow of the Sharp movies overcoming me?

Mastroiannani's real daughter plays his daughter in this movie, which i found delightful. Now I will have to see it again, and find out where the importance of the bells first became known. The psychoanalyst is precious, so much totally ANTI every psychologist you've ever known, but just as arrogant.

Since I'm 65 now, looking at M's hump made me realize how important it is to "Sit up straight and pull my diaphragm up from my tummy." Those humps can really make you look old. If he was faking it, he was doing a great job. You won't see another movie like this one, not even "Three Faces of Eve" is in the same genre. Great cinematography as well. What the little chickadees do, you don't want to have done to yourself, I can assure you.. Funny and sad, and oh, so tolerant of sexual infidelity....a French movie, indeed. And no offense meant to the wonderful French, without whom we would still 'be a dependency of England' (Gore Vidal).

Having just read about Raoul Ruiz's passing I was motivated to look up reviews of my favorite film of his. I am writing this because I was surprised to see that none of the reviewers seemed to get that the film was an allegory for the coming of the Euro currency. The "craziness" of the film is actually a commentary on the craziness of the Euro. For instance viewers will notice that the characters lose their personalities on the Rue Maastricht. The Maastricht Treaty laid the groundwork for the Euro in 1992 that wentinto effect January 1, 1999. Much of what is happening today with Europe and the Euro was symbolically foreshadowed in the film.

If you watched the film and didn't understand its underlying premise I suggest watching again. I am sure you'll experience an "ah ha" moment and will discover this crazy film of Mr. Ruiz's makes brilliant sense.