The Golden Boat (1990)

Director: Raul Ruiz

Screenplay: Raul Ruiz

Cast: Michael Kirby as Austin; Federico Muchnik as Israel Williams; Brett Alexander as Doc; Mary Hestand as Alina; Michael Stumm as Tony Luna; Kate Valk - Amelia Lopes

On a New York City street, the protagonist Israel (Federico Muchnik) finds a line of discarded shoes that leads to an older man Austin (Michael Kirby), covered in blood and proceeding to stab himself in the guts, all whilst saying he's from Los Angeles. Thus begins this jaunt by Chilean director Raul Ruiz, accompanied by a score by legendary experiment jazz musician John Zorn blaring on the soundtrack.

It was natural for Raul Ruiz, a true journeyman who made films throughout the Americas and Europe, to make at least one American film, though its notable he only ever made two films in the United States, this and thriller Shattered Image (1998), most of his career entirely out of this and mainstream cinema. Of note is The Golden Boat being from 1990, also when he was finally able to step back on his homeland's soil, fleeing Chile in 1973 during a military coup d'état and witnessed in The Wandering Soap Opera (2017), a 1990 workshop production finished in the 2010s by his widow Valeria Sarmiento, and also arguably ending his 1980s work with a bang. The eighties was the most delirious point of his career, alongside one of his most prolific, where his Euro co-productions were at their most heightened and surreal, including an English language adaptation of Treasure Island (1985) funded by the Cannon Group.

The Golden Boat is just as strange, as soon after this beginning a man wanders to Israel on the street with a stereo, claiming it is now his despite it never being Israel's either, only for Austin to stab the guy to death and follow Israel. In this tale, Austin now becomes a shadow picking people off around Israel, sometimes people die only to reappear again, as death is always a vague thing for Ruiz, a man who lived up to this in his own life as with Sarmiento's help he's still releasing films even after his own. One man, a neighbour of Israel, when stabbed by Austin just gets into a sit down conversation with him whilst tending to his stomach wound, a religious figure as unnatural as Austin watching on at Israel from afar.

To attempt to create a plot line, the only things I can say is that these two characters do know each other, spectres of a greater form who have wandered into Israel's life, Austin the atheist and the neighbour the religious. Israel's female neighbour, even when Austin kills her, will still be there, in the midst of this and even hypnotised to pose for a classroom's worth of people drawing her crammed into a small New York Apartment at one point. The eighties for Ruiz has been accounted for its full dream logic, reoccurring in all his career at its extreme then as plots regardless of budget, length or medium and be it for mini-series or a dance film Mammame (1986). In some cases they could be sketched loosely as novel adaptations of the likes of The Blind Owl (1987) as if crib noted.

This is also his New York City film, which allows for an alien view of the world to be shown; one of the funnier jokes, that has stuck with me, is a throwaway line about a cafe selling sushi hotdogs and won ton enchiladas. A tangent in a university turns into a bloody farce when a bathroom full of guys, spying on a female teacher, peeves Austin off as he cannot stand voyeurs. The Golden Boat has also never had a release in the 2010s, so it's vague to see his distinct visual style in the per-usual VHS form, strong artificial lighting and sudden changes to monochrome affecting his take on the United States.  Halfway through he even has an audience laugh track, as Austin is obsessed with a female soap opera star whose very well spoken husband is not impressed by his existence, even hiring goons in hope to silence him. Ruiz when you can see his films, as intended, was a great visual artist and its significant for how random he could seem to be, as liable to have purely surreal jokes as he is to have clear themes, he was very precise in his craft. One notable thing, which is part of the film's effect but worth mentioning, is that some of the performances' have a stilted air to them, in-between characters arguing about God or Israel being the hapless figure in the midst of all this, which can be very distinct.

The score is good and adds to the film's peculiar energy. By 1990, after developing his reputation for distorting jazz through various genres or reinterpreting the likes of Ornette Coleman, was when he had created Naked City and their innovative untitled debut, where his interest in extreme metal like grindcore met lounge music, surf rock and even the James Bond theme. I'd like to say this score, whilst not as extreme, feels from the same category of experimentation from that period, suiting The Golden Boat fully with eerie wordless vocals in-between crime jazz melodies and sparks of general strangeness by a talented legend. In general The Golden Boat is of note of having a who's-who of figures from filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, writer Kathy Acker (who plays the university professor), installation artist Vito Acconci (as a Swiss Assassin who may have killed the wrong person but denies it), the experimental theatre company the Wooster Group, filmmaker Mary Hestand or former porn actress/sex campaigner Annie Sprinkle (as a waitress).

It fits in the sense that The Golden Boat, one of Raul Ruiz's obscurer titles, was a trawl through American culture in general, where Israel is a music journalist, just for a joke about loud rock music causing him to become deaf, or its absorption of crime stories in hit men who repeat themselves. It's an acquired taste, but The Golden Boat does compel me, a curiosity whose off-kilter tone won me over, interrupting the digging up of a character buried at the beach at Coney Island with a random woman appear to give the two diggers sandwiches, or a boy claiming he's actually a dwarf in his thirties. Some of the dialogue referring to sexual violence is uncomfortable, like art being described as a form of rape, but The Golden Boat for all its lightness is still tinted in darkness, a tenseness where for how absurd it is Austin spends most of the film covered in other people's blood or his own, this a world with death hanging over people, in a pre cleanup New York City which looks dank and claustrophobic. The film also ends tragically, a death that lasts even if the story itself looks cyclical.

Considering Raul Ruiz's career, I am also forgiving of some of the more uncomfortable lines in this film as his career, even in the eighties weirdness, is permeated with a darkness of a man who fled a dictatorship, and was constantly obsessed with death and murder even in terms of films like City of Pirates (1983) involving a serial killer who is a child. He merely tinted it with a lot of bleak humour, as far as depicting Cantos 9 through 14 of Dante's Inferno, infamously, with ordinary location shots of his homeland of Chile in the 1991 A TV Dante sequel as a literal depiction of hell.

That it's not easily available is sad, even thought you'd presume an English language film like this might've been a lot easier to access or distribute. Shattered Image, a more structured crime film about a woman existing in multiple realities of herself, would've likewise made sense to be available. (Also A Closed Book (2010), whilst not regarded well at all, was a British production also shot in English that was a chamber piece thriller). Again, Ruiz has had a bad hand dealt to him in accessibility, despite his significant reputation, so obsessive devotees like me try to find what I can and write reviews like this to change that. A film like The Golden Boat definitely deserves this kind of support.

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Surreal/Weird

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