Ion Martea
posted 19 June 2007

When Raoul Ruiz released his adaptation of the last part of Proust’s In Search of Time Lost, Le temps retrouvé [Time Regained] (1999), it seemed that he was the only director working today capable of taking cinema beyond what great masters of the past, such as Visconti or Tarkovsky, had managed to achieve. His exceptional eye for detail, combined with a great skill for distorting the real, mean he is well-equipped to further both the grandeur and the wonder of cinema. Klimt, a film about another controversial figure around whom revolve many of the questions posed by an artist to himself, is indeed an event worth waiting for. However, though any serious filmgoer should see it, this well-conceived project unquestionably fails.

In Ruiz’s cinema there is no place for mindless entertainment, no place for plot and action in the traditional meaning. There is only the artist and his vision. The action, the plot, the entertainment – all come to life through the intense movement of the camera, or the seamless movement of the production set. The characters live not through what they do, but rather through what they see and, most importantly, through what they feel. Arguably, Ruiz’s output is never concerned with the mundane particularities of life, but only with the meaning of existence. His recent focus on artists trying to understand themselves through their failed lives, pointlessly evaporating into an ethereal sensation of experiencing the sublime through their art, is thus not surprising. Like his heroes, Ruiz is making cinema not for his public, but as a true artist, for himself. His plots are thus not adopted, but are new creations which are part of the director’s personal thought about art theory.

Gustav Klimt (John Malkovich) is the man who shocked the Viennese public at the turn of the last century with his savagely delicate representations of the world, and its most beautiful embodiment, the woman. Rejecting artistic norms by using a mixture of distortionary techniques, he set out to understand the essence behind the façade we all maintain in our public lives. His women were thus a real presence, not just as bodies, but with souls. Yet, in his private life, he rarely considered the soul, or treated love of the soul as what makes a true human being.

It is this dichotomy between the aims of the artist in his work and his deeds outside it that shapes Ruiz’s vision for Klimt. On this occasion, he is not so interested in capturing the essence of his hero’s artistic vision, and though he shares similar poetic concerns, he has made a film that is technically difficult to follow (even though it flows seamlessly).

Through a series of unconnected events involving an amorous affair and various sexual ones, as well as unconnected debates held by almost all characters on the question of beauty versus ugliness, Ruiz sets the artist at the core of his own damnation. From the desire to create beauty, joined with a self-confidence about what beauty represents, the artist finds himself mirrored in the pebbles of the image he has himself created. In a strikingly imaginative shot, the mirror facing Klimt cracks under his intense gaze, and it is in that moment of understanding his existential failure that the painter finds the meaning of his form. It is not surprising then to find Klimt’s search for beauty always through glass-like objects. His models are seen through roundels of water, his people live beyond an ornamented glass-door, even his most vivid love, Lea de Castro (a ravishing Saffron Burrows), is encountered in a motion picture by the famous illusionist Georges Méliès. In Ruiz’s account, Klimt’s vision is one of disjointed reproductions of reality, which enable the artist to find the true beauty simmering below the surface.

This self-proclaimed ‘phantasmagoria’ of Ruiz’s cinema does not work as a literary narrative, but rather as an intrinsically visual one. Malkovich, as Klimt, is always in focus. The cinematography almost always sets him in the best light, continuously eclipsing his background or foreground. The women are always exposed in such way that their bodies mingle between the pornographic and the iconoclastic. The set is in constant motion, stupefying the filmic tableau with various eruptions of oil-paint waves and contrasts. Above all, the lens (a mirror in itself) creates a sense of disjointedness that can hardly be reduced to a purely technical feat by the director and his crew.

In this amalgam of colour and sensation the viewer is always kept alert to the wonder of cinema. The elegance and style of both cast and the crew is shocking. Yet Klimt does not leave a positive impression. Arguably, Ruiz has forgotten to give a spine to his mammoth production. For once, his stylistic touches seem out of place in a screenplay that hardly seems to allow for any non-literary experimentation. The near-Dadaist script, poisoned by intense touches of Modernist symbolism and classical Romanticism, is an experiment in itself. There is hardly room for additional visual techniques if the illusion of artistic unity is to be maintained in a piece that celebrates the power of disjointedness.

Potentially, Ruiz is on his way to creating a new cinematic form that is neither real nor abstract, neither classical nor absurd, but a cinema that sets us at the centre of action; for we are the ones that must try and understand ourselves through cracked mirrors. Maybe he is asking for the impossible. Maybe. On this occasion, however, it appears that he has tried too much too quickly, for, unlike Klimt, we cannot detect anything simmering below the surface, neither beauty nor ugliness.