The Wandering Soap Opera of Raúl Ruiz

The Wandering Soap Opera, a distinctly unconventional movie written and directed by Raúl Ruiz, has a strange and wandering history. Known as La telenovela errante in its native Spanish, it was shot in 1990, not long after Ruiz’s return to Chile, the homeland he had declined to live in during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who had seized power from the socialist president Salvador Allende in a United States-backed coup on September 11, 1973. Ruiz’s years as an expatriate were peripatetic—he made many films in France and elsewhere—and hugely productive, as were all of the periods in a career that produced well over 100 features, shorts, and television programs, starting with the edgy short film La maleta in 1963 and ending with his death in 2011, a few months after he completed the lengthy Mysteries of Lisbon (Mistérios de Lisboa), a Portuguese–French miniseries. Along the way Ruiz left quite a few projects unfinished, and various enterprising cineastes—including his wife, Valeria Sarmiento, who edited many of his films and is herself a fine filmmaker—are now tracking them down and resurrecting them when possible. One result is the belated arrival of The Wandering Soap Opera, which Cinema Guild recently put into distribution. It comprises material shot by Ruiz in 1990 and brief bookend scenes shot by Sarmiento after a work copy of Ruiz’s footage was found at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, one of the American universities where Ruiz taught in addition to all his other activities.

Instead of calling himself an exile, Ruiz liked the term exote, which he defined in a remark quoted by critic Jonathan Romney, who has written perceptively on Ruiz’s films:

You’re an exote when you go everywhere and each country looks like a different place, impossible to deeply understand. After that…you return to your own country, and your own country is more enigmatic than the rest of the world.”¹

What needs to be added is that Ruiz’s cinema was steeped in enigma, ambiguity, conundrum, and mystery long before his exote phase, and it stayed that way long after he resumed good relations with his homeland of Chile after Pinochet left office. His body of work is enormously varied, ranging from expressively filmed theater (Bérénice, 1983) and dance (Mammane, 1986) to multiple-narrative melodrama (Three Crowns of the Sailor, 1983) and literary adaptation (Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, 1999) as well as straightforward commercial entertainment (Blind Revenge, 2009). But the films on which Ruiz’s reputation rests most solidly are those where the actual and the fantastical, the conscious and the unconscious, the physical and the metaphysical merge and mingle with abandon. The real is surreal and the surreal is reality in his prodigiously inventive pictures. And nowhere more so than in The Wandering Soap Opera, where the immediate and the mediated are almost impossible to tease apart.

For a movie shot as recently as 1990 and reconstructed as recently as 2017, The Wandering Soap Opera has accumulated a surprisingly large amount of inaccurate lore about its background. On internet sites one can read that Ruiz’s material was filmed in six days, that it was reconstructed from an intact screenplay written by Ruiz, and that its main organizing device—the scenes are divided into six chapters or “days” of varying lengths—was part of Ruiz’s plan from the beginning. Fortunately, a valuable 2018 interview with Sarmiento sets the record straight.² It is true, as assorted sources have reported, that Ruiz’s footage was shot as part of a workshop he set up for actors and technicians interested in learning his methods and techniques; however, the shooting period was longer than six days and the project was left incomplete when the funding ran dry. The supposedly authoritative screenplay was actually a rough sketch—basically “nonsense,” according to Sarmiento—and the idea of dividing the material into chapters came from Sarmiento, who also heightened the playful dizziness of the picture by framing some of Ruiz’s footage within old television sets. (Sarmiento also corrects the impression that she and Ruiz stayed away from Chile throughout the Pinochet years; they visited there occasionally from 1984 on, observing firsthand the barely hidden violence and “savage capitalism” that overtook the country and became objects of critique in Ruiz’s films.)

Now that it's finally in circulation, what sort of beast does The Wandering Soap Opera turn out to be? A very odd one, more funny–peculiar than funny–ha-ha, disarming and disorienting in approximately equal measure. Some of it is sharp political satire, broad enough to strike home even without taking account of specifically Chilean references—it's hard to miss the point, for example, when a series of assassination teams wipe each other out in a farcically quick series of abrupt shootings and failed attempts to publicize revolutionary manifestos. Other scenes are soap-opera parodies, sometimes centering on characters in one show commenting on characters in another, and some sequences involve encounters in streets or saloons where soap-operatic actions and soap-operatic shows on nearby TV screens may compete for attention. Wordplay abounds—two strangers bond over the remarkable fact that the letter “H” appears in their names—and actors playing multiple roles further enhance the movie’s vertiginous nature.

Aside from the international soap-opera industry, two primary spirits appear to preside over The Wandering Soap Opera. One is the towering Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, whose predilection for dreams, labyrinths, and proliferating mise-en-abîme delirium finds unruly counterparts in many Ruiz films, this one emphatically included. The other presiding spirit is Luis Buñuel, the cinema’s greatest practitioner of surrealism, and like Ruiz a nomadic figure who made movies in many lands and languages. Another key reference point is Ruiz’s own concept of “shamanic film,” a kind of cinema that

makes us believe we remember events which we have not experienced [and] puts these fabricated memories in touch with genuine memories which we never thought to see again, and which now rise up and march towards us like the living dead in a horror movie… [touching off] a process which could permit us to pass from our own world into the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, even to the stars, before returning to humanity again.³

This is heroic wandering indeed.

Hosting a special screening of The Wandering Soap Opera at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway Theater in Baltimore, Maryland, recently, I wasn't surprised that audience members found surrealism a useful entryway into this semi-hilarious, semi-confounding, semi-anarchic movie, which throws up many obstacles to understanding but offers distinctive rewards to those who tune into its eccentric wavelength. In the same year when Ruiz was shooting its raw material, I interviewed him for the Monitor Channel in Boston, Massachusetts, asking what audience he had in mind for his productions. His answer was as affable and generous as I always found his personality to be when we met: “I think I’m quite friendly. I have a lot of friends, and those friends are from different countries and from different cultural and economic levels. My idea is to put all my friends together.” For that very good reason, he concluded, “maybe the model of my audience is those friends.”⁴ Not every viewer of The Wandering Soap Opera will feel friendly to Ruiz in return, so unorthodox its structure and so uncommon its tropes, but most will agree that they have never seen a film quite like it and may never see such a film again.

Notes

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David Sterritt

David Sterritt is Editor-in-Chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video. He wrote about and interviewed Raúl Ruiz for multiple outlets during almost 40 years as film critic and cultural correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor.

Notes

1 Romney, “Film of the Week: Wandering Soap Opera,” in Film Comment.

2 Grijalba, “Interview: Valeria Sarmiento,” in Film Comment.

3 Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, p. 79.

4 Quoted in Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, pp. 238–9.