Fado, Major and Minor (1994)

 

Director: Raul Ruiz

Screenplay: Raul Ruiz

Cast: Jean-Luc Bideau as Pierre; Melvil Poupaud as Antoine; Ana Padrão as Ninon; Jean-Yves Gautier as Joachim; Arielle Dombasle as Leda; Bulle Ogier as Katia

An Abstract List Candidate

 

This dream only contains overseas products.

Obscurer in the career of Raul Ruiz - it was effected early after its release due to rights issue¹ - Ruiz was originally going to Portugal, which he had already made a film within and would after, to adapt Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband. This film turned out differently and, coming off as a broken record or fittingly having a line from a previous Raul Ruiz review echo in another from a director known for ghosts hovering in his work, this seems deceptively subdued for the Chilean filmmaker. Then, having thought this, the film decides to go into his stranger territory when a young girl submerged her face into a glass jug of water, spooling tuberculosis related blood from her mouth like a ribbon.

This is, however, a film which feels like a transition point for Ruiz is approaching. Gone is the unpredictability in Ruiz's filmmaking from the eighties - the bizarre and memorable camera angles and shots, the heightened colour palettes - but focused on a further eeriness which is coupled, with a small role by French legend Bulle Ogier, to the films he would make with huge European stars and John Malkovich. Fado... is a strange, increasingly darkening film in which we start with Jean-Luc Bideau          as Pierre, a tourist guide who suddenly forgets what he is meant to talk about and slowly unwinding as a person. A young man called Antoine (Melvil Poupaud), a cruel man, with his daughter appear in his life. Unable to remember his past, Pierre is encountered by this young man in connection to the death of a young woman, a spectre of an incident where a woman hung herself he was connected to.   

Spiralling from there, Pierre encounters Ninon (Ana Padrão), a young woman who is an erotic dancer as well as a maid, intertwined with a series of increasingly dark and perverse vignettes which intertwine with Pierre's past. Following Ruiz's love for stories-within-stories, Pierre's past when learnt, shot in monochrome, is of being an encyclopaedia salesman, one whose habit of seducing married women comes to haunt him as he sees both side of a relationship, between the husband who goes to erotic shows off to the side, and the woman herself who is a gilded bird in a cage, one whose life ends in tragedy. Fado... definately follows closer to Ruiz's interest in films following their own worlds then necessarily consistent elaborate plots, sinking further into perplexing and unsettling territory.

Definitely, this even in a filmography of a director who will gladly tackle the subject, is the most kinky and even perverse of the Ruiz films I have seen, where images seen and not seen (and merely talked of) add a corporeality and even bleak humour, such as eating soup in front of a hanged woman by accident, or when Ninon offers to have sex with Pierre in a men's bathroom, turning into a farce when other men complain that it should be a place of relief, watching through the open cubicle door, not for fun. Some of the content, merely evoked, is extreme and fully into transgression when Pierre is taken to a home ran by women, and dominated by them, despite being the harem for a male character, where the abortions are done downstairs and the obsession of Antoine to shot the dogs they keep owning stems from a sexual taboo. At some point, including the later revelation, even Pierre, a man comfortable with a lot of sex and even keeps scented cards of the women he has been with, finds himself learning of material which is too much.

It is an acquired taste, but Ruiz's film has a progression in mixing the darkness and a twisted sense of humour with ease, feeling for the most part in the first half fully grounded into reality until Antoine suddenly starts eating glass, blood coming from his mouth, and not batting an eye to this. There is an entire tangent in Pierre's past, arguing with a man over a hat, which leads to said hat floating in front of them in public, the film's more and more dripping in the surreal without losing its more calmer and mood based production. Cinematographer Jean-Yves Coic sadly did not do much more after this film, which is a shame as, with Ruiz moving away from his complete unpredictability from the eighties to gestating the irrational in a grounded aesthetic look, Coic makes the film look appropriately moody to match the tone. The Portuguese location as well, an idyllic coastal town our initial setting, is appropriately calming at first until the film descends into the peculiar. The cooler colour palette itself adds a distinct touch.

The humour is there too, which balances this out. For all the heightened melodrama, taken to its extreme by the finale which could be confusing for some on the first viewing figuring out what has been resolved, touches show the absurdity. Like all Ruiz films, penned by him usually, the dialogue is memorable when someone says "An encyclopaedia is a luxury.", or that the response to seeing his master dead, hung upside down and shot in the head, a male staff member weeping copious tears running down his face in cartoonish exaggeration. The references to the Tarot, cards which have developed occult symbolism, will likely to be found the more you see the film. That Fabo, Major and Minor is sadly an obscure film is tragically going to undercut the ability for many to even see the movie, but if access was easier I can see as with all the director's work a lot to uncover.

Two years later to this film, Ruiz would make Three Lives and Only One Death (1996), one of Marcello Mastroianni's last films, and I can see the inevitable leanings to a different type of Ruiz gestating. Including an unexpected tangent in the United States, a thriller with William Baldwin called Shattered Image (1998), Ruiz's career would go through a brief huge tangent in big adaptations like Marcel Proust, and there is a sombre richness prickling through Fado... alongside his dark humour and absurdity which would grow.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Weird

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

 

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1) Referred too HERE.