Ruiz: Shattered Image (1998)

Shattered Image marks Raul Ruiz’s first and last effort at a big-budget American picture – and it’s not hard to see why it flopped at the box office, since it’s just as uncompromising in its labyrinthine narrative visions as Genealogies of a Crime. On the one hand, Ruiz presents us with Jessie (Anne Parillaud), a Nikita-like hitwoman who tracks her male victims through a postmodern cityscape; on the other hand, there’s Jessie (also Parillaud), a writer holidaying in Jamaica with her husband Brian (William Baldwin), where she’s trying to shake off Hitchcockian suspicions that he might be trying to kill her. There’s no indication which of these narratives is meant to anchor us, and the connection between them becomes more Moebius-like and porous as the film progresses, suggesting that it’s their interface that most preoccupies Ruiz – specifically, their interface between a postmodern architectural universe and a Hitchcockian architectural universe. At first, this interface feels quite unlikely, but as the worlds become more intertwined, it makes sense: just as Hitchcock’s mise-en-scenes brim with observation-networks in which anything and everything could be watching, so postmodern space tends to jettison sightlines from any specifically human agency or vision. Among other things, this places the burden of narrative, suspense, and even acting onto the film’s objects, making criticisms of the highly stylised performances somewhat irrelevant, since these actors only ‘act’ insofar as they accept their continuity with the uncannily enlivened objects that surround them. And virtually every object brims with threatening, talismanic sentience, until it feels like space itself is contoured more by the infinite regression of objects than by any conventionally geometric co-ordinates. Ruiz has long been interested in surfaces that morph in and out of three dimensional sentience in this way, but whereas those surfaces are usually pre-cinematic (friezes, tapestries, tableaux vivants), here they feel more aligned with hyperreality, or virtual reality, largely thanks to the way in which cinematographer Robby Muller heightens an already lurid big-budget Hollywood aesthetic, drawn equally from the neo-noir of the 1980s and the erotic thrillers of the 1990s. It’s hard, then, not to regret that Ruiz didn’t have more of a future in the American market, if only because the film is one of his most fascinatingly futuristic, taking up Hitchcock’s mantle just as Brian de Palma was starting to discard it.