In Raul
Ruiz’s The Territory, four adults and two kids set off on a guided
hiking trip, soon starting to argue with their guide about the apparent lack of
progress, parting from him and subsequently finding him dead, their plight
worsening so that they ultimately turn to cannibalism, their numbers nevertheless continuing
to dwindle. Such a summary may make the film sound like a relatively straightforward
narrative, and therefore of course in no way represents the gorgeously strange,
disorienting experience of actually watching it. In Ruiz’s singular hands, even
the basic details of who these people are, where they are, why things happen
the way they do, are elusive; for every moment of apparent clarity, there’s
another in which the film takes a startling lurch, introducing new characters
out of nowhere, or providing odd tidbits of information which may or may not be
seen as “clues” of a kind. Without claiming that these ever yield a corresponding
solution, an emphasis on literature in the closing scenes suggests that the
territory is in a sense a space of pure creative capacity, eventually devouring
the artistically repressed, capable of being traversed only through submission
to endeavour and extremity, causing permanent ripples in the afterlives of any
who emerge from it. But at various points the film could also be taken as an
ecological parable, or (noting the use of such artifacts as maps and masks) as
sly genre parody, among almost limitless other possibilities I’m sure. At every
point, Ruiz blurs the distinction between objective weakness and sly ambiguity:
by conventional standards, for example, the actors’ delivery often feels
stilted and uneasy, but this rather supports the sense of a commitment to experimentation
that blurs the difference between life and art (even the objective errors
within the credits, such as crediting John Paul Getty III as “paul Guetty jnr,”
seem playfully strategic).
No comments:
Post a Comment