Raúl Ruiz: An Annotated Filmography

Días de campo (Journées à la campagne, Days in the Country, Chile/France, 2004)

Maxime Renaudin

Dias de campo marks another return by Raúl Ruiz to his homeland of Chile after the television experiences of A TV Dante (1989) and the epic Cofralandes (2003). Considered as a fiction feature, however, it is his first after thirty years of exile.

Thirty years also separate old don Frederico (Mario Montilles), sitting in a nowhere café, not so sure of being comfortable in this country of the Dead – and, at the same time, at his age of shaky convictions, anxious to put down his memories on paper. ‘How is your novel now, don Frederico?’ ‘I’ve got it, I just have to write it.’ Thirty years of memories to be reinvented. Tired of being left unfinished, the novel takes the liberty of writing itself, calling up the ghosts of yesterday along with those of today in don Frederico’s peaceful estate, where rainy everyday life is disturbed only by buried secrets and unexpected apparitions.

During this nostalgic reverie, we actually do not see much of Chile, but we soon know every single square of the estate’s residence. Or, rather, we don’t know it at all. Ruiz takes such great care to vary the axes of the camera angles and play with the few sources of light that (I admit) I would not be able to draw the geography of the place. As if, waking up, I tried to catch the pieces and fill the gaps of an elusive dream. But there is no harmonious whole, only dislocated parts that are signs of complexity. Such discontinuity is also at stake within individual scenes – the young servant changing from terror to hilarity when a change in scale offers a close-up (a ‘deciptated head’ as Ruiz would say) of her crazy laughing face; or within a individual shots – don Frederico, drunk and unsteady, turning to a swinging boxer after a brief walk off-screen. These scattered images eventually join up at the end, when the secret resolves itself in an old photograph, the two halves of which are finally put together.

This world of life and death refuses any chronology. Old don Frederico wanders through the house and occasionally meets his thirty-years-younger self; he listens to the announcement of his own death tirelessly repeated on the radio; the voices of yesterday still wait for an answer in the tired walls of the abandoned house. What is striking here is less the coherence of Ruiz’s approach (which can be taken for granted), rather the fact that he forever pursues his project of time as a dimension – neither something simple or obvious, nor a dream a subterfuge – of the cinematic medium itself. When the shadows of don Frederico’s dead self bend over his shoulder, the surprise (if any) does not last: he is as dead now as he will ever be – dead and alive, simultaneously, as his own projection.

Ruiz tries not to yield to a bankrupt sentimentality – those sentiments too quickly offered and digested – through his work with his actors, upon whom he gazes more as an entomologist or an explorer than as a father-confessor. In this respect, the supreme impassivity of Marcial Edwards (the ‘young’ don Fernando, aged sixty) is exemplary. This distance, and the delicate intimacy that it induces, contributes to the persistent and touching melancholy of the film. The melancholy of things that did not happen but could have happened, which Ruiz particularly cultivates. (In his Poetics of Cinema, he writes: ‘Every film buff has at least one special experience, the object of his regret. Mine is neither sad nor happy, given that it never really happened. It provokes a melancholy that the Portuguese call saudade: nostalgia for what might have occurred.’ [p. 108]) The book of an entire life that will never be written; the letters of an absent son, which the old servant Paulita (Bélgica Castro) writes to herself, recreating her life as a loving – and loved – mother; thirty years of memories which may be only a dream; and, moreover, thirty years of a work in exile for a filmmaker who reinvented a life of dreams all over the world.

When don Frederico, in the nowhere café, finishes the reading of his last poem – ‘When We Will Be Old’ – the success of the film is contained right there, in this revealed sentiment: the uneasiness and anxiety of those who know how many in the world are already dead.