Love Torn in a Dream
| Love Torn in a Dream | |
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Film poster
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| Directed by | Raúl Ruiz |
| Produced by | Paulo Branco |
| Written by | Raúl Ruiz |
| Starring |
Melvil Poupaud Elsa Zylberstein Lambert Wilson |
| Music by | Jorge Arriagada |
| Cinematography | Acácio de Almeida |
| Edited by | Valeria Sarmiento |
| Distributed by | Le Petit Bureau |
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Release date
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Running time
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123 minutes |
| Country | France Portugal Chile |
| Language | French Portuguese Spanish |
Love Torn in a Dream (French: Combat d'amour en songe) is a 2000 film directed by Raúl Ruiz. The film's narrative spans nine interweaving stories, most of which take place in the 17th or 18th centuries, which feature fantastical characters such as pirates, nuns, young priests, a cannibal, a sultana, the Devil, and many more. To further complicate the already dizzying web of tales, many different characters are played by the same handful of actors across stories. This theme of the same individual portraying numerous identities extends beyond the limits of this one film (as many of Ruiz's themes do) and can be viewed in the larger context of Ruiz's work: for instance, lead actor Melvil Poupad is someone who has been in several of Ruiz's films since his childhood. In 1983, at age ten he starred in Ruiz's City of Pirates and went on to act in The Insomniac on the Bridge, Treasure Island, Three Lives and Only One Death, and Genealogies of a Crime.
Produced by Gemini Films, Madroga Filmes, Canal+, Radiotelevisao Portuguesa, among others, Love Torn in a Dream premiered August 20000 at the Montreal World Film Festival where it won for its category. From there, it went on to be released in France November 2000, Portugal May 2001, the Netherlands January 2002 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Poland October 2002 at the Warsaw Film Festival.
Opening in black and white with a puzzlingly self-aware narrated scene of Love Torn Within a Dream producer Paulo Branco welcoming the cast at a celebratory ceremony, the film quickly establishes (with the help of an illustrated configuration upon a chalkboard, one that explicitly references the theories of Ramon Lull’s ars combinatoria, one of Ruiz’s ongoing artistic preoccupations) that there are nine stories that will weave in and out of each other throughout the film: The Meditations, The Robber Mirror, Twenty Two Rings, The Healing Painting, The Discussion, The Pirate’s Treasure, The Prophetic Site, The Castle of Dreams, and The Traveling Companion. Through overlapping threads and exchanged objects, these nine stories form some supposed twelve in total, though the situation becomes increasingly jumbled and less clear as the film goes on. A handful of actors portray different characters across storylines and centuries – Lucrezia, the nun-turned mystical nymph is played by the same woman (Elsa Zylberstein) who portrays modern-day Jessica who interacts with Paul, a student disturbed by a website foretelling his future. Paul is played by the same actor (Melvil Poupaud) who plays the troubled young Catholic who discovers he is Jewish, while many pirates and thieves, corpses and even the devil exchange actors in less pronounced roles throughout the film.
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