This review is for the full-length, 152 minute version, Manoel dans l'île des merveilles.
Part 1, Les Destins de Manoel: Manoel is a 7-year old child (the actor looks a little older) living on Madeira, an island west of Portugal. He lives with his mother and father and at the beginning of the film they have suffered a robbery, the loss of the family jewels. Manoel doesn't really know how important this will be as he goes off to school; he hears a strange voice, guiding him and calling him, and he decides to skip school and visit a forbidden garden behind a gate. Walking through the door he enters a huge open area and a feeling of mystery and oppressiveness is upon him and the viewer. He walks through a cave to a cliff above the coast and meets another young boy, apparently himself from the future, who tells him the story of what he has done today and what the future will bring. This begins a string of episodes in which whether Manoel goes off with a hoary old seaman, find the jewels, answers several questions from his teacher in the right way or doesn't do these things changes the course of his and his family's life. Finally in an effort to avert catastrophe, it seems that his only choice is death for himself, but then
Part 2, Le pique-nique des rêves: Only on a particular mountain meadow can Manoel and his fellow school-children engage in a common dream, a dream that their teacher wishes to control so that they can achieve something the island needs, a hospital; but Manoel cannot get to sleep and he screws up the dream, encountering a strange man who is whacking a tree to get wine from it. The tree is a relative, and the man has control over his relatives who serve him as trees, and over the birds; he is apparently an immortal magician. He tricks Manoel into switching bodies with him through a coin that Manoel gives him, and Manoel immediately regrets the switch as he cannot function in the adult world. He tries to communicate with his parents, but they think him mad and the magician helps to keep him away by attacking him with birds; Manoel finally steals into the house at night and finds the coin, and the magician disappears after the switch. Manoel is sent to live with his aunt and cousins in a huge old mansion some distance away at this point, as his mother dies suddenly (again her death was the first which he went back in time to avert in the first episode). He is driven there by a Danish sailor who speaks English to him. His 2 male cousins, about his age, play weird violent games and there are apparently ghosts; his older female cousin is a smoker and perhaps a rebel. We are also introduced to the world's girl chess champion, Marylina, a girl about Manoel's age who was eugenically bred and artificially born from a woman who was dead, a story which harks back to a story told by the old sailor in episode 1 of a shark-child. Manoel listens to her story on the radio, then plays an odd game on the roof of the house with his cousins as the sun is setting, in one of the most visually striking sequences of the film, and then
Part 3, La petite championne d'echecs: Part 3 seems to me more overtly theatrically/filmic than the first two episodes; at the beginning Manoel's aunt may evoke Norma Desmond, and the house that faded, grand movie-château, and there is even seemingly a William Holden type, though no one lies in the swimming pool, in fact at one point Manoel flies above it, by magic. There is a sailor who visits the house, who may be a younger version of the old seamen in part 1, or not; hand-shadow games are played by kids and sailor. There is a striking scene where Manoel is pulled through a keyhole while listening to the adults; one of Manoel's cousins disappears and the aid of Marylina, the only person smart enough to solve the mystery, is enlisted. There is talk of mysteries and conspiracies, the Eiffel Tower and coca cola. A long scene in a nursery with the children playing and just a hint of the erotic, childish and fantastic but then turning scary as the sailor returns, perhaps a villain; he is killed and we find out that he is but a doll. Adult Manoel, years later, walks through the empty mansion and sadly pronounces it smaller than he remembered it
.and then 7-year-old Manoel is watching a group of children, much like his classmates from Episode 2, being led up a hill; this time they are dressed in uniforms and are saying their mother's name, "Mary" over and over.
A film celebrating the magic and the terrors of the childish imagination, obviously; firmly grounded in Ruiz's well-developed surrealistic world-view, which seems to derive in part from influences as diverse as Borges, H.G. Wells, Orson Welles, Jacques Rivette, Luis Buñuel, filtered through his own displacement and his pan-cultural history as a filmmaker and a person. 'Manoel' is a phantasmagoria of ideas about imagination, adulthood seen from childhood, destiny, the nature of play, performance, magic, voyages
.it is very beautifully shot and evocative of a timeless, mystical place outside of the world we know, despite its obvious low budget and 16mm format. Ruiz is a master of sound as well as image his birds are as terrifying as Hitchcock's, and he also gets a wonderful variety of music from his usual composer, Jorge Arriagada lullabies, lush Hollywood romantic symphonic, weird electronic scary music reminiscent of "Dr. Who", and the lovely music-box lullabies that open and close every segment.
