DVD of the Week: “Night Across the Street”

The Chilean director Raúl Ruiz was a very sick man with a new lease on life when he made what would be his last film, “Night Across the Street,” which I discuss in this clip. In Le Monde, Isabelle Regnier reported that, in 2010, Ruiz had had a liver transplant and soon thereafter, in early 2011, rushed this film into production, telling his producer, François Margolin, that shooting had to start in two weeks. Work began in April; in August of that year, Ruiz died. According to Margolin, “It’s a film that he wanted to be seen once he was dead. Like Bergman with ‘Saraband,’ like Huston with ‘The Dead,’ he conceived this film as the one that should complete his oeuvre.” It’s a movie about death. It doesn’t give anything away to say that the plot carries its elderly protagonist beyond the end of life, as well as back to his childhood. It makes memory both the stuff of life and a living death, as the protagonist, Don Celso, suspecting that he’s nearing the edge of the cliff, turns his back to it and looks homeward. “Night Across the Street” is, in short, one of the most poetic, serene, comical, and inventive movies about death ever made. It comes out on DVD today.