Directed by Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento • Drama • With Luis Alarcón, Patricia Rivadeneira, Francisco Reyes • 2017 • 78 minutes
Filmed by Chilean master Raúl Ruiz in 1990 but left unfinished until it was completed by his wife and collaborator Valeria Sarmiento in 2017, The Wandering Soap Opera is a dreamily interconnected series of vignettes that spoof on telenovela conventions while reflecting Ruiz's feelings upon returning to his native Chile after more than 15 years away. In one episode, a man seduces a woman by showing her his muscles, which are actually slabs of raw meat slapped into her hand. Later, the man has a gun pulled on him when he accuses a poet of plagiarism. Meanwhile, through the television screen, five women have lost their husbands after an earthquake and embrace a better future together. All along, back and forth across screens, people are watching. Shot in gorgeous Super 16mm and featuring one zany performance after another from a cast having the time of their lives, The Wandering Soap Opera is a glorious sendup of the telenovela, which, at the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, Ruiz called the very best lens through which to understand "Chilean reality."
Up Next in Latin American Cinema
-
La Soledad
Directed by Jorge Thielen-Armand • Drama • With José Dolores López, Marley Alvillares, Adrializ López, Jorge Roque Thielen, María del Carmen Agámez • 2016 • 89 minutes
Handyman José lives with his family in La Soledad, a ramshackle villa located in what was once among Caracas’ most affluent neig...
-
Bluebeard (Kékszakállú)
Directed by Gastón Solnicki • Drama • With Laila Maltz, Lara Tarlowski,
Katia Szechtman • 2016 • 72 minutesHailed as "an eerie high-modernist fable... mightily minimalist, and drop-dead gorgeous" (Film Comment), Kékszakállú is a beguiling portrait of several young women at the threshold of adu...
-
Tony Manero
Directed by Pablo Larrain • Drama • With Alfredo Castro • 2008 • 98 minutes
Raul Peralta, a middle-aged criminal in 1970's Chile, is obsessed the idea of impersonating Tony Manero, John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever. Every Saturday night, he unleashes his passion for the film's mu...
