生活如梦

It takes as its starting point two plays by the Spanish Golden Age dramatist
　　Calderón de la Barca, which Ruiz had directed on the stage; both of which were
　　called Life is a Dream and tell the same story but in different ways. The original
　　plays concern the son of the King of Poland, who has been imprisoned by his
　　father because it is predicted that he will depose him. One day the king orders
　　the sleeping son to be brought to the palace and given to believe that he is king
　　for a day, causing his son to be confused about what is real and what is a dream.
　　In Ruiz’s film, a literature teacher has learned by heart the names of 15,000
　　militants opposed to the military junta in Chile by memorising Calderón’s play and
　　using it as a mnemonic device. When he is captured, he has to forget everything
　　so as not to betray his comrades, but ten years later he tries to recapture his
　　memory by visiting a cinema showing a film based on Life is a Dream. Ruiz uses
　　this setting to explore a complex set of relations dealing with memory and the
　　layering of reality. The film is also about the experience of cinema, as the virtuality
　　of the film is confounded with the materiality of the cinema auditorium,
　　which becomes a place in which the story is enacted. For instance, characters on
　　a train, whom we at first take to be part of the film the teacher is watching, are
　　revealed to be on a model train set that runs around the cinema, in which other
　　strange things occur: birds fly around the auditorium and a Western shoot-out
　　takes place across the seats.