Raoul Ruiz’s Love Torn in Dream is an inscrutably hypnotic, painterly, structurally organic, and logically impenetrable film that lyrically and visually conflates a series of historical periods, role-swapping character actors, and states of consciousness into a fanciful – albeit distended and maddeningly opaque – tale of love, fate, and destiny. Similar to Time Regained in the lush imagery and temporal fluidity of the film, Love Torn in Dream episodically interweaves several fable-like stories that include of a band of pirates marooned on a coast, a seminarian who plays an innocuous prank on a demure and beautiful nun at the confessional, a young man searching for his father, a restless wife who pines for her absent husband, and a fatigued web developer who discovers an internet site that predicts his actions 24 hours in advance. However, despite its sumptuous texturality and intricate composition, the film suffers from a tediously repetitive and defiantly nonsensical and idiosyncratic absurdist tone.
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