Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on rockin’ flatscreen.
The last time I watched a Raoul Ruiz film, I was wildly disappointed. I absolutely hated Time Regained. It’s fair to suggest that most of my problems with it were technical; I couldn’t read the subtitles. It’s also fair to suggest that I didn’t see enough there to bother with it should I find a better copy. No, it was pretty, but there didn’t seem to be much there. There’s a reason I’ve put off Trois Vies et Une Seule Mort (Three Lives and Only One Death) until now. I haven’t trusted Ruiz to want to watch this one again.
What I got was not a confusing mess of poor subtitles, though. Trois Vies is a conundrum of a film, but not an unpleasant one. What we have is four stories, each featuring the great Marcello Mastroianni in one of his last roles…or four of his last roles if you’d rather have it that way. The four stories turn out to all be connected, but the connections are not obvious, and even when they become known, they don’t specifically make sense.
