Trois vies et une seule mort

Plot synopsis:
Pierre Bellemare, a French radio personality appears to recount four strange, seemingly non-coexisting, tales that make up the complex narrative structure of Three Lives and Only One Death. In the first tale we are introduced to Andre Parisi, a family man who has woken up with a terrible headache. Andre leaves to a local cafe where he meets one of the multiple enigmatic central characters, Matteo Strano (Marcello Mastroianni). Matteo offers Andre champagne and 1000 francs to listen to his story. Prior to the scene of Matteo’s own storytelling, he reveals he was once married to Andre’s wife. Matteo recounts the day he went out, on a whim, and rented out an apartment. Matteo insists this apartment is inhabited by fairies who eat time and who ultimately devoured 20 years of his life in one night. Matteo uses the story of his “strange journey in time” to entice Andre into going to his “fairy house.” Andre accepts Matteo’s request and is surprised to find that the apartment actually exists. Matteo takes Andre’s fondness for the apartment as an acceptance of a deal that allows Matteo to go home, leaving Andre to remain in the bewitched apartment. When Andre refuses to take Matteo’s place “he finds himself with a hammer in his head, thus retrospectively explaining his headache as a premonition.” After a 20 year hiatus Matteo returns to his former home and his former wife, Maria, as if nothing had changed.
Bellemare then recounts the tale of George Vickers, a 69-year-old bachelor and Professor of Negative Anthropology at Sorbonne. When Vickers ascends the main stairs at Sorbonne, to give the opening lecture at a major conference on Negative Anthropology, he pauses and is overcome by a strange force and feeling. The strange force takes him to a graveyard where he shortly experiences grief. When a storm breaks out he becomes profoundly happy, so much so that he does not look for shelter. He becomes a beggar overnight and strangely finds success. Vickers is ambushed on a routine walk home to an abandoned courtyard, but is saved by a prostitute Tanya La Corse aka Maria Gabri-Colosso. Tanya takes Vickers back to her apartment. Vickers explores her apartment and grabs sight of a series of books by Carlos Castañeda. Meanwhile, it is revealed that Vickers occasionally hears Carlos’s voice. Vickers professes a passionate loathing of those works in Tanya’s apartment. Vickers and Tanya/Maria form a firm friendship; Vickers even moves to a new bench to be closer to his new friend. Tanya/Maria tests the new friendship by entrusting in Vickers to keep a close eye out for her extremely dangerous ex-husband. When Vickers fails to to alert Tanya/Maria he returns home to a bench outside his mother's home. When he learns of her death he “experiences a strange feeling of nostalgia” and returns to his role as a professor. One day the past catches up with him and he learns Tanya/Maria also lived a double life as the president of a huge electric company, who had been led to prostitution by her husband. Vickers and Tanya/Maria rekindle their relationship and marry. Like clockwork, Vickers once again ascends the main stairs at Sorbonne when he suddenly pauses, walks back down the stairs and leaves for the graveyard. Meanwhile Tanya/Maria('s) ex-husband returns and "re-ignites her taste for the perverse.” Both Tanya/Maria and Vickers once again reverse back to their roles as Prostitute and as beggar.
Bellemare opens the third tale with an announcement about the foundation of the tale, that of which “extreme happiness is an extreme form of misery and excessive generosity is an excessive form of tyranny.” Bellemare also proclaims that the next story is “so true it has taken place not once, but several times.” This third tale which revolves around a young Parisian couple, Cecile and Martin, in love sets the stage for the “crossing between the stories and roles played by Mastroianni." The young couple receives a mysterious weekly gift of 2,000 francs in their mailbox and proceed with their perfect happy life. Both Cecile and Martin “embark on affairs out of kindness.” Cecile cheats on Martin with the next door neighbor, Piotr, a college student who cannot bear to hear the couples "all-consuming" love for each other. Martin unknowingly finds employment with Cecile’s mother, Maria from the first tale; they too have an affair. However, the young couple forgives one another. The stories from earlier begin to collide in a seemingly rapid pace. Cecile takes a job working for the businesswoman Tanya/Maria. Later, Tanya/Maria and her ex-husband attempt to entice the young couple into perverse games, but they throw the idea out when they notice the young couple isn’t sexy. One day the couple doesn’t receive their regular earnings in the mailbox, due to the fact that their “protector” has died. However, their protector remembers them in his will and leaves to them the possession of a Mansion and its butler. The butler, another character played by Mastroianni, responds only to the sound of a bell. The butler plays odd games with the couple, who are now expecting a child. The butler hides the bell and drugs them into sleeping for days on end. One strange night Martin finds the Butler conversing with a businessman and a “tramp.” The tramp leaves Martin bloodied and dazed. This leads to the couple's immediate departure. Their inability to recognize Mastroianni as proprietor and butler results in him claiming the couple's new-born child, which he later leaves on Maria's door steps.
In the final tale Bellemare introduces Luc Allamand, a successful businessman in his 70’s. Luc receives a surprising phone call, in the middle of the night, detailing the arrival of his ex-wife, daughter and sister. Luc is taken aback by the news because they do not exist, he invented them for business reasons. Feeling ill Luc returns home and finds his wife, “a 32-year-old star singer in the hands of her accompanist.” Carlos’s voice can be distinctly heard whispering, this appears to turn Luc into a sleepwalker. Luc then wanders aimlessly and returns to Maria and his former home as Matteo, once again as if nothing had happened. Mastroianni’s multiples identities begin to cross at a more rapid pace. Maria supposedly awakes Matteo, but instead hears Vickers talking in his sleep about Negative Anthropology. Maria then confronts Matteo about his “mistress” Tanya/Maria. The sudden sound of a bell brings triggers Vickers the beggar. His begging nearly turns violent, but Maria is able to find a coin in time to reverse Vickers back to Matteo. That same day Mastroianni’s characters return to their former residences. Meanwhile, all the women in his life have been receiving threatening letters. Luc returns to his office where he meets with a famous psychologist Luca Agusta, who congratulates Luc for inventing three women that now exist. After awakening from a bad dream Luc heads to a river where he is confronted by Carlos. In the meantime, all the women in his life rendezvous at a cafe where they encounter all of Mastroianni’s characters. All of the identities become murderous and converge in the cafe, resulting in a series of deaths.

Tags: psychedelic, avant garde, storytelling

Review:
Weird and Wild.
Chilean director Raul Ruiz created a weird, wild, fantastic world with Three Lives and Only One Death.
Marcello Mastroianni plays four different characters in as many different stories that at first seem completely separate, but by the films end are wholly intertwined.
It is beautifully, almost mystically shot, effectively using shadows, light, and computer imagery to create painted like imagery.
It is a bit confusing, but wholly satisfying film.In the first story Mastroianni plays a salesman who walked out on his wife (Marisa Paredes) twenty years ago.
The wife has since found another husband (Feodor Atkine) and is living a seemingly happy life.
For reasons left unexplained Mastroianni suddenly decides he wants his old life back.
He catches the new husband, at a Tabac and offers to pay him 1,000 francs for a hour of his time.
What proceeds is an imaginative, fantastic tale of why Mastroianni has been gone for twenty years.
It is far to complicated to explain here, but lets say it involves a room with moving walls and tiny fairies who prefer to eat franc bills, but will settle for newspaper.
The end of the story finds Mastroianni wanting to leave the second husband in the fantastic room, while he moves back in with his wife.In the second story Mastroianni plays a successful professor who, for reasons that are all his own, become a beggar, and a rather successful one at that.
He befriends a prostitute (Anna Galiena), who he later finds out isn't all she pretends to be, and whose husband (Jacques Pieiller)is something of a psychopath.In the third story a young couple (Chiara Mastroianni and Melvil Poupaud) find themselves being mysteriously supported by an unnamed friend.
After months of finding 1,000 francs in their mail box each week, they learn this mysterious stranger has died and left them his mansion.
The catch is they must keep on a peculiar butler (Mastroianni of course) or lose everything.
The fourth story is really a means to tie all three stories together, and yes, it is weird.
There is a lot going on throughout the film.
It is visually stunning, complex in story, and a delight throughout.
It is the type of film that really deserves a second, and third viewing to allow thoughtful absorption of the many details.
In what was his second to last film before his death, Mastroianni does a masterful job playing these varied, and interesting characters.It is a film not meant for everyone.
The story is a weird and complex as anything put out by David Lynch.
But for the lover of cinema, there is much to appease the appetite.
It is a beautiful, layered, surreal film that is a true pleasure to watch.Like this review?
Go to www.midnitcafe.blogspot.com for more..
Prescient allegory about euro currency.
Having just read about Raoul Ruiz's passing I was motivated to look up reviews of my favorite film of his.
I am writing this because I was surprised to see that none of the reviewers seemed to get that the film was an allegory for the coming of the Euro currency.
The "craziness" of the film is actually a commentary on the craziness of the Euro.
For instance viewers will notice that the characters lose their personalities on the Rue Maastricht.
The Maastricht Treaty laid the groundwork for the Euro in 1992 that wentinto effect January 1, 1999.
Much of what is happening today with Europe and the Euro was symbolically foreshadowed in the film.If you watched the film and didn't understand its underlying premise I suggest watching again.
I am sure you'll experience an "ah ha" moment and will discover this crazy film of Mr. Ruiz's makes brilliant sense..
Three scaffolds and no edifice to support.
With his work in the 80's Ruiz managed to cast upon the French conundrums about time and reality an oblique, dreamlike light.
A light that diffused the essay into heady magic, into shadow play that was dangerous and sultry with the impossible.
He would see Welles from the other side of the mirror, from the fictional looking in.None of that here, instead dry vignettes like a French Bunuel.
Some wit and irreverence and a few touches about convergent realities that remind of his earlier films are lost in too much transparence.The structure is reminiscent of something he would do.
A surreal comedy where Marcello Mastroyanni is three different characters.
All three stories are framed by a narrator reading them for a radio program.
Eventually the three lives converge, worlds overlap under a single author who weaves himself in fictions that inexplicably become real, but they converge and overlap too late and no real sparks fly.Whereas earlier Ruiz trusted intuition to take him to the place where ideas mean things, here he starts from ideas and structures as he goes on.
It is all scaffold, elaborate, suffocating scaffold, with no edifice to support.
Ideas cast adrift without anchor.
Compare with the richness of his 80's films about sailing inwards..
Three deaths.
Great dark humour, very funny, felliniesque film.
Mastroianni is as good as always.
A tad confusing at times.
Requires complete attention at all times.
The ending is the best part, a very clever film..
Obviously a Farewell Film for this Great Lover.
Wonder how many of his wives and lovers found themselves in this film.
He is old and splits off into many diverse personalities: and does so quite successfully.
The fairies are a little hard to take.
However, one of the wildest roles is the one by msieu Doucard, that evil French spy in the Sharpe movies.
With overalls, he plays a simple Frenchmen who meets a really wierd end at the hands of Mastroiannani.
The actor is too intelligent, though, and he didn't quite hide his intelligence as well as say, Billy Bob Thornton in his similar role.
In other words, you don't buy that Msieu Doucard would be so gullible, or is that the shadow of the Sharp movies overcoming me?Mastroiannani's real daughter plays his daughter in this movie, which i found delightful.
Now I will have to see it again, and find out where the importance of the bells first became known.
The psychoanalyst is precious, so much totally ANTI every psychologist you've ever known, but just as arrogant.Since I'm 65 now, looking at M's hump made me realize how important it is to "Sit up straight and pull my diaphragm up from my tummy."  Those humps can really make you look old.
If he was faking it, he was doing a great job.
You won't see another movie like this one, not even "Three Faces of Eve" is in the same genre.
Great cinematography as well.
What the little chickadees do, you don't want to have done to yourself, I can assure you..
Funny and sad, and oh, so tolerant of sexual infidelity....a French movie, indeed.
And no offense meant to the wonderful French, without whom we would still 'be a dependency of England' (Gore Vidal)..
Surrealistic, strange, talky, flat, confusing..
Raul Ruiz has crafted a genuinely surrealistic film, dealing with such subjects as identity, time, chance and the cyclical pattern of events, but for all his camera tricks (some of which are outstanding), his storytelling is rather flat, and his characters talk too much.
Ruiz asks for too much patience and too many allowances on the part of the viewer, without giving his stories the kicker that would justify them; his one big revelation was all but spoiled in pretty much every review of the film, not to mention its own title.
Three Lives and Only One Death.
This French film was another one I found in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book, being a 90s film it was odd that it was hard to find to watch, but I did eventually find it and wanted to see if it was worthy of the book placement.
Basically Marcello Mastroianni plays a man with multiple personalities, the film focuses on four, travelling Parisian salesman Mateo Strano, Sorbonne university professor of negative anthropology Georges Vickers, a mute country house Butler working for a wealthy newlywed couple, and industrial magnate Luc Alamand.
Mateo shows up at the home of the wife he abandoned twenty years ago, María (Marisa Paredes), she remarried André (Féodor Atkine), he tells his story to André that he has in fact been living in an apartment across the street the entire time, he lures André to him and murders him with a hammer, María suspects nothing as he returns calmly, she even introduces him to their adopted daughter.
George Vickers still lives with his cranky mother until he becomes a tramp, on the streets he encounters streetwalker Tania (Anna Galiena) with a passion for philosophy, the hooker and tramp stay together until Vickers returns and leaves, following this George discovers Tania is in fact president of a major corporation, and when he learns she has been jailed for the attempted murder of her creepy ex-husband Vickers comes to her rescue.
The newlywed couple are struggling a little, but their lives change dramatically when a benefactor provides them a marvellous country house, they are also given a mute butler who serves them well, but they slowly figure out their valet, who actually owns the château, is plotting to kill them with slow poising, to steal their fortune, terrified the leave, but he finds them and demands they give him their baby daughter, he gives the child to Maria, Mateo's ex-wife.
Finally Luc Alamand is in trouble, learning that potential clients he wants to impress want to meet his wife, daughter and sister, and they are actually coming, the stress causes his other personalities to emerge, each have wildly different lives, but are all clearly similar characters, and it is all bound to end in s=destruction and confusion for himself and some others.
Also starring Melvil Poupaud as Martin, Chiara Mastroianni as Cécile, Arielle Dombasle as Hélène and Jean-Yves Gautier as Mario.
Mastroianni is amusing playing the four different personalities embodied in one man, the story is okay but rather hard to follow, and to be honest I didn't laugh at a lot of it, I know it is meant to be funny, and I'm not sure the placing in the 1001 Movies book is one I agree with, but it was an interesting enough fantasy comedy drama.
Good!.
Marcello's next to last appearance in the cinema.
"Three Lives and Only One Death" directed by Raoul Ruiz, was probably a vehicle for Marcello Mastroianni.
The film marked the end of the life of one of the greatest actors of all times.
A giant among giants, the actor probably sensing his own death played not only one, but three different roles.
There are many messages within the story, one of which seems to be pointing to the unification of the single currency not only in France, but in the countries of the European Union, something much in the news these days.The narrative consists on three stories that are interconnected.
Each one shows Mr. Mastroianni at the center of the story.
Mr. Ruiz showed his admiration to the surrealists masters of the genre like Luis Bunuel and his followers.
As far as the narrative is concerned, the film has an absurdist character in stories that speak about everyday life, played by larger than life characters.
The situations do not make sense, although there is a basic story line that is kept throughout the film.The best excuse for watching the film is to see Marcello Mastroianni in his heavily accented French having a good time playing disparate people.
Others in the cast include the actor's daughter, Chiara in the third vignette playing opposite Melvil Poupaud.
The first story features Feodor Atkine who meets an unexpected fatal attack.
Marisa Paredes, Aurore Dombasle and Anna Galiena also appear as the three women in the main character's life.