The Wandering Soap Opera (2017)

Directors: Raul Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento

Screenplay: Raúl Ruiz and Pía Rey

Cast: Luis Alarcón, Patricia Rivadeneira, Francisco Reyes, Roberto Poblete , Liliana García, Mauricio Pesutic

How befitting Raul Ruiz as a director, when he made a career of characters that even when passed from the mortal plain still wandered around the living, who made over a hundred plus films in his life as elaborate labyrinths and mysteries in themselves, still releases films long after his 2010 passing. This is entirely due to him having so many fragments he recorded to film, secret productions that may still be uncovered or just known about online filmographies and yet to be fully available, but it is a specific virtue he can now add to his reputation, his widow and fellow filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento making such an admirable effort in finishing unfinished projects like this with the advantage that she was his editor for many of his productions since the beginning. With a career full of dreams within dreams and mysteries, he feels the right person to become a ghost who can still release cinema in the 2020s, as an unfinished 1967 production next to be premiered at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival. Even the fact that Orson Welles has managed this feat, releasing The Other Side of the Wind (2018) decades after his mortal passing, feels symbolic as Ruiz influenced by him.

The Wandering Soap Opera itself is vignettes with actors playing multiple roles. It was one of many workshop projects as Ruiz would in his career also teach, becoming a film studies professor even at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland for a brief period alongside two volumes of film theory texts. The workshops being filmed isn't surprising in a career of a man who worked regardless of the type of project or any restrictions.

The most prominent historical detail, which adds a lot of context to this project, is that this was made the first time Ruiz set foot back in his home country again after fleeing in the seventies at the beggining of the Pinochet regime, Augusto Pinochet leading a dictatorship that would end in 1990 when a 1988 national referendum voted against him extending his rule a further eight years. Fleeing his country with his wife Sarmiento led him to France, eventually working in various multi-national projects over the eighties onwards to the end of his career. The Wandering Soap Opera is a film that, whilst a fun series of odd fragments, has a darker side which makes sense learning this detail. It says a lot that, with chapters with titles, one is a quote by Ruiz himself saying that when you die, you could be stuck being a Chilean.

The title refers to this being a Chile, as the initial idea was, where it was all actually a giant telenovelas, a special form of soap opera found in Latin American countries. Whilst there are differences, soap operas are something which the English like myself can attest to the powerful aura of and see his idea for implementing this, as TV magazines are devoted in their covers to the lives of fictitious characters played by actors as if real people, in decades long ongoing "soaps" like Eastenders (1985) which rarely end if successful. Ruiz takes it to an extreme where everyone in Chile is in a soap opera, sometimes watching other people in other soap operas, even soap operas entirely devoted to watching to soap operas and commenting on them. Effectively Raul Ruiz predicted Gogglebox (2013-), a British series entirely about ordinary families being watched watching TV shows viewers also watch and commenting on them which has lasted at least seven years.

There's no sense whether anyone has a job outside from being in these soap operas, and everything has a sense of a) being in a heightened absurdity in Ruiz's mind, and b) a sense of everyone being watched by everyone else, which just evokes the dictatorship that existed a year before this film's initial creation. Some of the skits explicitly show this, the first segment in-between a man trying to seduce another man's wife and showing her his muscles, i.e. producing two pieces of meat out into her hand and offering to eat them raw with lemon with her, hinted at this with them aware they might be watched. (Even the joke, when the husband appears, that he's more concerned about the lemons likely being poisoned, alongside a whole array of lemons of various shapes or just other types of fruit, suggest paranoia of a metaphorical level). One of the soap operas, watched by a star of another show and a man (who turns into a priest and another person by an edit on the sofa) leads to him pointing out the humane rules of torture of the Catholic Inquisition, that they made sure the families were warned ahead of time and the tortured still had to be able to leave on their feet, juxtaposed by only sound and dialogue of the programme they are watching involving people being tortured and crucified.

The best segment for myself too is entirely explicit in what it is parodying, in which one duo of political assassins get killed by another as they procrastinate trying to write a note about their political message over their slain targets, only for the other duo to procrastinate about their message and be killed by another pair of assassins and so forth until its repeated ad nauseum to ridiculous lengths. The Wandering Soap Opera beyond this is a very whimsical work with moments of darkness, reflected in the fact that this is Sarmiento's film as much as her husband's, bookmarked by behind the scenes footage of his filming, one that reflects his reoccurring motifs between light weird humour and darkness. The later is found prominently in moments like a soap opera within a soap opera where young wives discover their husbands have died (their ghosts wandering past) only to decide to stay as a friendship of young widows. The lightness is found continually, such as the segment of people who all have "H" at their forename which eventually leads to someone growing tiny eggs out of their person (which are eaten) to the titular Wandering Soap Opera, a Turkish melodrama whose heckling as an outside program feels like a comment on xenophobia in itself.

The production, even in mind that this was a workshop originally, looks handsome with the additional symbolic weight that this and The Golden Boat (1990), a production in the United States, feel like the tail end of Ruiz's eighties period. That was a decade which managed to be more prolific and bizarre than even than any other of his, involving the fact he could make up to over four productions a year at his peak, alongside crystallising trademarks such as bright coloured lighting (pinks here particularly in The Wandering Soap Opera) and striking visual set pieces. Eventually it gets to the point cast are on TV screens watching other TV screens, and this level of delirium is inspired. This is more significant as this is a rare case of being able to view a Raul Ruiz film as was intended, as my admiration for the director is confounded by the fact his eighties period let alone any other is usually available only by a low resolution VHS rip, versions online being the only way to see them.

Seeing The Wandering Soap Opera as intended, Ruiz had an incredible visual eye as much as in his ideas, a visual richness which was always happy to go for cheap visual techniques too as much as an incredibly heightened style, from shooting on everyday streets on location to an erotic dancer (the daughter of one of the characters in the audience) being only seen in silhouette. The result is special for me, and it's certainly abstract. Quieter than most I've seen by the director, who can be insanely surreal, but the format actually helps especially as the cast have multiple roles, everyone doing well with such idiosyncratic material, and providing the film an added weirdness in that everyone literally changes places and roles like soap opera cast members.

The final segment, involving male cast members with a piglet and a kitten and a rabbit whilst attempting a spiritualist channelling, ends the film on further dark humour and melancholy, death and two mysterious sewing women alongside a man appearing inside a crystal ball presenting his suicide note like a broadcast host. It perfectly encapsulates Raul Ruiz's style before the end credits. It's probably a film to tackle later if you are new to him, due to the archival context, and sadly it's a film not likely to be as easily accessible as one hopes, just for the fact that Raul Ruiz is still despite his reputation not as highly regarded (and accessible) as he should be. But I've nothing by happiness that it exists and I saw it. Knowing another film is to be restored and finally released in the 2020s, and that there's probably more material Valeria Sarmiento is going to find from her husband, adds to his enigmatic aura for the better especially as he was a great director already.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Surreal/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium