Dark At Noon
Directed by Raul Ruiz
With John Hurt, Didier Bourdon, Lorraine Evanoff, David Warner and Daniel Prevost
Showing at the Glebe Valhalla, Sydney
Reviewed by Norm Dixon

Exiled Chilean avant-garde film maker Raul Ruiz's latest film Dark at Noon is a bizarre tale in a bizarre setting inhabited by bizarre characters.

The film opens with Felician (Didier Bourdon), a frustrated French doctor in a Catholic hospital plagued by unwelcome miracles: dead patients come back to life, diseases transform themselves. The church authorities insist that the miracles remain secret, because too many will undermine the masses' faith in religion.

Receiving word that his father has died, Felician travels from Paris to Portugal to recover the old man's investments in a very strange factory which makes artificial limbs. Dumped in the countryside, he follows a trail marked by thousands of crutches to the “Village of Dogs”.

There he finds that the townspeople sleep during the day (often standing, or walking about arms extended zombie-like, but more often than not sprawled where they fall) and make merry all night. Dogs infest the village, devouring any odd corpse that happens to be lying about. A multitude of interactive visions of Madonnas appear without warning and hold the villagers in awe. This is a rather strange place.

Once prosperous due to the carnage of the first world war, the prosthetics factory in now forlorn. The town is ruled by a bizarre marquis (John Hurt) with a penchant for burying people alive. Felician meets the marquis's brother, Antony (also John Hurt), whose callous opportunism in exploiting the victims of war has produced dire consequences. Antony's fiancee, Ines (Lorraine Evanoff), is also affected.

There is also a strange painter, Ellie (David Warner), whose creations literally suck the life out of their subjects.

As the film progressed, the plot became more fragmented and what little point there seemed to be in the film receded from view. Fortunately, the acting, the locations and the special effects maintained interest. John Hurt's performance, as usual, is excellent and Didier Bourdon, like the dozen or so reviewers present at the preview, spent the entire film looking justifiably bemused.

What does it all mean? Ruiz has described Dark At Noon as a story of a doctor “who tries to escape from miracles and finds himself in a country full of supernatural events. My films are about the multiplicity of souls, or worlds and about the coexistence of several persons inside one body.” Hmmm ...

If nothing else, Dark At Noon will kindle many late night, cappuccino-driven, inner city cafe conversations.

This article was posted on the Green Left Weekly Home Page.
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