Review of Three Lives and Only One Death (1996) by Zoran S — 16 Aug 2009

It's not as stylistically baroque or metaphysically obscure as Ruiz's best films, but this is nonetheless an entertaining and often perplexing film. Like a lot of Ruiz films, it has something to do with storytelling and the leaps in temporal and spatial logic that are required for any story-- and any character's identity within a story-- to become coherent.

In negative terms, it is about revealing those leaps in logic that we take for granted. Thus, here multiple identities converge into singular bodies and the need for story resolution is enjoyably mocked with a completely nonsensical ending.