Dark at Noon
| Dark at Noon | |
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| Directed by | Raúl Ruiz |
| Produced by | Leonardo De La Fuente Pierre Bernard Guiremand Antonio de Cunha Telles |
| Written by | Raúl Ruiz Paul Fontaine |
| Starring |
John Hurt Didier Bourdon |
| Music by | Jorge Arriagada |
| Cinematography | Ramón F. Suárez |
| Edited by | Helen Weiss-Miller |
| Distributed by | Sidereal Distribution |
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Release date
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Running time
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100 minutes |
| Country | Portugal France |
| Language | English French |
Dark at Noon (French: L'Œil qui ment, lit. The Eye that Lies) is a 1993 Chilean-French comedy film directed by Raúl Ruiz.It was entered into the 1992 Cannes Film Festival.
The film portrays a surrealist world that Felicien, the protagonist played by John Hurt, must navigate through as he seeks to learn what has become of his deceased father’s fortune. Described as “an elaborate Dadaist joke” by The New York Times, Ruiz’s film was intended to emulate a Monty Python-esque humor with deadpan comedic tone.
Post World War I, the French doctor Felicien travels to a small town in Portugal to visit a factory his father invested his fortune in prior to his death. Upon his arrival to the town with fields of crutches protruding from the ground, Felicien finds the area to be a surreal dream world where visions and miracles are such ordinary occurrences they become a nuisance. The dogs of the town are sacred animals and the the people of the town are the sleep walking undead. Felicien finds his way to a mansion where Anthony, the wealthy owner of the factory that produces prosthetic limbs, resides with his wife Ines. After sitting through a very bizarre dinner with the residents of the mansion Felicien has an equally strange dream involving the couple.
While exploring the town Felicien meets a priest buried in the ground by Ellis, an artist who uses corpses to make living paintings and who looks identical to one of Felicien’s psychiatric patients. The priest is exhausted by the endless miracles, as it is his job to excommunicate people for performing miracles not authorized by the church. Felicien continues to have strange encounters that blur the lines between illusion and the real, including conversations with Le Marquis, who inhabits the same body as Anthony, and the Virgin Mary who mimics and mocks Felicien when she appears before him. He also meets a young boy who performs miracles and helps Felicien out when he can’t find a bathroom and needs to urinate. One of Felicien’s more unusual encounters is with a giant sculpture of a finger made from marble that crashes through the ceiling of the guest room of the mansion, nearly crushing him.
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Wikipedia