Three Lives And Only One Death

An extraordinary film from Chilean director Raul Ruiz. Radio personality Pierre Bellemare -- France's answer to Robert Ripley of Believe It or Not fame -- narrates four tales of the uncanny, each starring Marcello Mastroianni as a man driven by inexplicable compulsions. In the first story, he leaves his wife one afternoon to buy a pack of cigarettes and doesn't return for 20 years. In another, he's a respected professor at the Sorbonne who one day finds himself living the life of a street beggar with a strong aversion to Carlos Casteneda. The stories are all ingeniously linked, and together they form a filmic puzzle box full of trompe l'oeil surfaces and fa...