I had long been interested in watching this one (and had even toyed with the idea of acquiring its BFI PAL VHS in the mid-1990s) but, having now caught up with the film, I cannot say that the end result fully lived up to expectations!
It is quite a unique effort, mind you, but very uneven in tone – a reflection of the many 'cooks' involved in the 'broth' since, despite the overall credit to Richter, many another avant-garde artist was responsible for the various dream sequences that basically comprise the narrative (Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, etc.). This is also why I preceded its viewing with a number of shorts by all these exponents of experimental cinema and, for what it is worth, I opted to check the film out on the day of Richter's own birthday!
The concept is an intriguing, even noir-ish, one – accentuated by the initially down-on-his-luck protagonist and constant voice-over. The fantasies range from the romantic (a henpecked man braving a labyrinth for the sake of his idealized beloved recalls the work of Jean Cocteau) to the musical ('sung' by a mannequin and dreamt by a geeky girl liberated to femme fatale status by the hero's attentions), and from the prescient (the audience at an interactive movie theater imitate every move of the actors on-screen) to the insipid (a lazily derivative 'rotating shapes' display by Duchamp serving as the visions of a gangster type – who on earth but mathematicians dreams of such things anyway?!). The last hallucination, then, is reserved for the leading man himself – his assuming a blue countenance at this point presumably representing his own uniqueness (in view of the gift he is able to 'bestow' upon others).
As I said, this is more worth watching for its intentions than for what is ultimately achieved; the colour scheme, at least, makes it that more palatable to the adventurous movie-buff. Incidentally, we also have here one of the very earliest examples of a pre-credits sequence on celluloid.
