Mysteries of Lisbon Filmmaker Raúl Ruiz Passes Away at 70

With his latest film, the well-received four and a half-hour opus The Mysteries of Lisbon, still in theaters stateside, Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz has passed away in Paris following a lung infection. The director, who had made over 100 films in his nearly five-decade career, was 70.

The Chilean-born filmmaker began making films in the 1960s and moved to France after Pinochet assumed power in 1973. His films earned him numerous European awards; four of them (That Day, Marcel Proust's Time Regained, Three Lives and Only One Death, and L'oeil qui ment) were nominated for the Cannes Palme d'Or. Of his most recent film, the epic period drama The Mysteries of Lisbon, Movieline's Stephanie Zacharek wrote:

With The Mysteries of Lisbon Ruiz has pulled off a work that's both grand and intimate, as if he'd seized on the seemingly paradoxical idea of building a mansion-sized dollhouse and made it work. Ruiz was born in Chile but has lived in Paris since the 1970s. He's made more than 100 movies in the course of his career, though not many of them would be familiar to American moviegoers. (The exception might be his 1999 adaptation of Proust's Time Regained, starring John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve.) Here, Ruiz and cinematographer André Szankowski work in the fairly straight tradition of the period drama, but they never corset it too tightly. The picture breathes as it moves, even though the pace here is definitely stately. Ruiz appears to have had lots of fun with the movie's little visual touches: The reflection of illicit lovers is captured in a tiny mirror image; the face of a storyteller spinning out a tale of woe looks back at him, and us, from the surface of a cup of tea. Ruiz has treated the world of culture, with a capital C, as if it were a Sears-Roebuck catalog of great ideas waiting to borrowed: He takes a few pages from Vermeer's soft-glow chamber lighting and Corbet's way around a misty landscape.

Read the full review here.

The Mysteries of Lisbon, meanwhile, is still in limited release; see a listing of play dates here.

[Le Monde, El Mostrador]