68: Three Lives and Only One Death (Trois Vies & Une Seule Mort – Original French title)
Extreme happiness is a form of misery.
When a voice on the radio in a film is this philosophical it’s never just there to add verisimilitude. In this case it speaks to one of the many plausible underlying reasons for some very strange circumstances. A man leaves his apartment headed to the drugstore with a headache. He’ll be back in an hour he tells his wife. As he picks up cigarettes he’s confronted by another man. “I’m running late” he says. “So am I.” Offering a drink, the confronter claims to have been the first husband of the man’s wife, who disappeared some twenty years ago. Compelled to chat for a moment, the man listens to a story detailing the disappearance. It seems that it was not that the first husband intended to leave his wife, but that he was simply distracted for two decades when he went out to look for a bigger apartment. Upon finding a suitable space, he became fascinated by the fairies that lived in the walls and the floor, and suddenly twenty years had passed him by. The teller of this story, Mateo, is played by Marcello Mastroianni. It is one of four roles (or is it only one?) that he plays in this odd film from Raoul Ruiz, in which this instance, while fanciful, is only the beginning of the strange happenings.
To describe the plot of Three Lives and Only One Death (1996) would be ludicrous. I watched several sequences of the film multiple times and am supremely confident that this piece has to be seen to be understood. Suffice it to say that what appears at first to be a “hypertext” film, in which multiple story lines and numerous characters who initially don’t seem connected eventually converge, is in reality is so much more…or perhaps less, I’m not sure. In some of the many stories contained herein Mastroianni is the lead, and in at least one he is a supporting character. In all of them he is enigmatic but good natured. Curiously the film’s title alludes to three lives, but in reality he leads at least four. In the successive stories that the film presents he is the absentee husband Mateo, the professor/tramp Georges, a silent butler referred to only as “Bell”, and a fractured businessman, Luc. As each character he seems to be distantly aware of the others that he has already portrayed, but it is not until late in the film that we know why.
Just as his characters seem subliminally aware of his other manifestations, each new segment of the film also subtly includes elements of what has come before. Though each seemingly new vignette is unique, minimal aspects of the somewhat distinct visual style of previous sequences creep into the background. Ruiz is often described as a “postsurrealist” filmmaker and as I described in my review of his Time Regained (1999; #73) he has a way of making objects, sets, and characters seem to float in the spaces they inhabit within the frame. This tactic is suited perfectly for this material, as he pulls trick after trick out of his filmmaker’s bag to invoke the sneaking suspicion that the world he’s presenting is not quite what it seems. The fact that he’s able to pull it all together by the picture’s conclusion is stunning, as is the work of Mastroianni within this weird world.
Marcello Mastroianni was the symbol of Euro-cool in the early 1960s. He was the voice and the face through which Fellini re-imagined the possibilities of cinema. He seemed to transcend characters, embodying instead the spirit of what the movies were going to be about in the new decade. And he looked good doing it. Arguably, no man has ever worn sunglasses on camera better than Mastroianni did. They were him, and he was them, and it was good. His characters were detached, and that seemed fitting. He was what cool was, defining it as he went along, driving around the streets of Rome in sports cars.
Mastroianni was in his mid-thirties then. He was over 70 when he shot this, his second-to-last film, and the sunglasses are nowhere to be found. He needs the expressiveness of his eyes for this role(s), and he uses them to great effect, conveying much of the sadness of his character’s past(s). I have not seen his entire catalogue of work, but I am certain that this is one of his best performances. Early in the film he asks his former wife’s new husband, “Can you imagine what hell it is, just loving and being loved?” I think this line explains much about this enigmatic movie, and perhaps as much about Mastroianni’s thoughts on all of his characters. Ruiz chooses to use this line in voiceover, I think because if we saw Mastroianni’s face as he said it, the film would be all downhill from there.
Language: French
Runtime: 123 Minutes
Available @indiemoviesonline.com
Grade: 3.5 Hats Off
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