The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror (Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento, 1967/2020) (Patreon)

If The Wandering Soap Opera was analogous to Eyes Wide Shut -- a work that a master had all but completed, that only needed minor technical finishes in order to bring to fruition -- then I'm afraid The Tango of the Widower... is more along the lines of "Free As a Bird" by "The Beatles," a patchwork effort cobbled from the contents of an old file folder, something that ought not to be added to the filmography without a big old honking asterisk.  I do think there's something admirable in Sarmiento's desire to explore the vast reserves of Ruíz's archive, given that he was a fitful, often distracted artist, even allowing for the political vicissitudes that disrupted his career in Chile. And yet, I think we may well be approaching the point of diminishing returns.

After all, there is Surrealism, and there is nonsense. And a lot of what we see in the first half of The Tango of the Widower just seems to lack the connective tissue necessary to elucidate its major themes. We know we are dealing with mourning and loss as a set of dual crises, something that our subject wants to intellectualize away through discourse but cannot contain. But what the film actually provides us is inconclusive; irruptions from the unconscious are indistinguishable from plot points and symbols that are never properly elaborated. (Are they making champagne from women's stockings? Are the wigs emblems of the dead woman, or broader implements of femininity as mechanized deception? Etc.) 

Running the whole thing in reverse is an ingenious solution to the problem posed by this doomed restoration, and it is actually more conceptually satisfying than one might expect. In fact, this maneuver saved the film for me, up to a point. Seeing Sarmiento unwind her own salvage-job on her husband's project, we not only get to reconsider all those strange elements that (still) make no sense. We are actively invited by the film to evaluate whether or not the project itself was a failure. And that it a fairly gutsy move, especially considering all that had to be at stake emotionally for the woman at the helm.