Movie Tuesday Five Cheers For Ra L Ruiz
It speaks to how amazingly prolific Raúl Ruiz was that he’s still managing to entertain us from beyond the grave. This week Facets is screening the Chicago premiere of The Wandering Soap Opera (aka La Telenovela Errante), a collection of scenes the Chilean-born filmmaker shot in 1990 and that his widow, Valeria Sarmiento, completed in 2017. As I wrote in this week’s issue of the Reader, The Wandering Soap Opera touches on all the filmmaker’s favorite themes—paranoia, narrative intricacy, fleeting but meaningful friendships—while advancing the baroque (yet proudly low-budget) aesthetic for which he was beloved by cinephiles worldwide....