I've seen multiple Japanese films with labyrinths in the title, but not in a physical sense. These are labyrinths of the mind; navigation of the abyss of our emotion and thoughts. Choices we shouldn't have made, choices we should've but didn't. Things we couldn't avoid. Things we don't want to. The rumours we spread to escape reality. Why do we care about those who actively destroys us?
Labyrinth of Dreams is the rain outside the window in an empty train.โฆ
Where is my motherland? I no longer remember.
We are made up not only of our lived experiences, but also of the experiences we couldn't live. Of fragmentary daydreams; frontiers we never reached; countries on atlases and artefacts in solemn museum halls; foam-dashed shores and towering ancient ruins and fog rolling over foreign islands. Memories formed from water-damaged postcards, familiar songs, and fantastical tales overheard as children. Sokurov's halcyon Elegies make me restful. They say: forget all your worries, not because you should but because you have to. Live in your dreams, for they will soon be inseparable from reality.
4.7/5
A sort of metatextual throw-up of late-night television. Made-for-TV quality and yet surreal enough that it becomes something else, something of a vibe piece. Ruiz gets too comfortable here, with a decently convoluted but predictable storyline that still entertains. Certainly interesting though and not symbolically void either.
You can tell he's paying the bills here by using a more generic American framework, but this doesn't stop him from implanting a real lovely atmosphere reminiscent of Footprints on the Moon, and the set design is eerie, as though a Lynch film with the detail removed. I definitely enjoyed it though, regardless of it's downfalls.
3.4/5
The day God forgives me I'll shoot myself
Here Ruiz creates two lineations; one is of the American dream, an immigrant dream, ethnically individual and yet geographically united, where all misunderstand eachother equally no matter their accent or background, listen to music in languages they cannot speak: blood spilt for internalised necessity rather than prejudice; and the other is of a destruction inherent in this dream, a false-awakening in the capitalist nightmare, of selfish murder and art rape and rapacity,โฆ
I'm starting to understand that my passion for collecting is in fact a hopeless and desperate attempt to save the remains.
A young lieutenant is dying, and the War is dying with him. A life, misremembered. Faded, poisonous. World-weary from a world passed by. Ephemera hastily collected in order to compartmentalise life's easy-slipping dream; in order to justify an incomplete existence, yet one mourned long before. Two states within eachother; Galicia and Austria-Hungary, both coming to an abrupt crescendo. Inexperiencedโฆ
