Ruiz: Généalogies D'un Crime (Genealogies Of A Crime) (1997)

Even more so than Brian de Palma, Raul Rúiz interprets Hitchcock as an architect, rather than a director, crafting neo-Hitchcockian thrillers which attempt to envisage how Hitchcock might have looked if his narrative proclivities hadn’t got in the way of his architectural proclivities – or, alternatively, how Hitchcock might have looked without a screenwriter, or as his own screenwriter. As one of Rúiz’s most self-consciously Hitchcockian films, Genealogies of a Crime perfects this dissolution of architecture and narrative, in its twisted tale of a lawyer who moves into the house of a murdered woman, both played by Catherine Deneuve. While it doesn’t really work as a film, it works beautifully as a building – the narrative quickly convolutes to the point where it becomes plastic, tangible, and malleable enough to act as a foundation for the reticulated spaces that Ruiz erects on top of it. And Rúiz’s construction materials are his extraordinary tracking-shots, which continually trace out the contours of a building which seems at once coextensive with and oblique to the actual rooms, corridors and stairwells we’re inhabiting. These tracking-shots don’t deepen the mise-en-scene in a conventional way – in fact, they tend to remove mise-en-scene altogether, flattening each shot to a tableau, just as the lens assumes the plasticity of a hypothetical wall or surface. Rúiz’s affinity for tapestries, friezes, wall hangings and other decorated surfaces – the nexus between two and three dimensional spectacle – has been well rehearsed throughout his career, but it’s put to particularly spectacular use here, as people become indistinguishable from the spaces in which they appear and objects flatten as soon as they approach the camera; one of the few narrative flashpoints revolves around a psychoanalytic society that “uses tableaux to represent the instant just before a fatal gesture.” Reinterpreting Hitchcock as a canon of objects – or, rather, a canon of object relations, objects just emerging as discrete bundles of space – Rúiz distends and develops his dream-sequences into something other than both cinema and architecture – a dream-architecture that resonates with the film like dreams resonate with waking life, at the most unexpected moments and in the most inexplicable ways.