Shattered images

Plus a word from our poster boy

The first popular movie freaks in history were the post-World War I French Surrealists, who, taking note of the resemblances between dreams and films, located their entryway into the unconscious not in calculatedly artistic movies but in the unplanned disjunctures and uncanny moments of denigrated-by-intellectuals genres: chase comedies, serials, low-budget horror pictures. Later, in America, Joseph Cornell created a brilliant found-footage dreamfilm, Rose Hobart (1936), by ingeniously re-editing a mumbo-jumbo piece of Hollywood tropical exotica, East of Borneo. In France, the Surrealist Georges Franju made Judex (1963), a masterly retelling of Feuillade's 1917 serial, which had been embraced by Aragon and Breton, about a pre-Batman master of disguise.

Shattered Image, opening this Friday at the Coolidge Corner, is a dandy, playful movie loyal to this tradition of finding enchantment, and the disquieting door into nightmares, through the retelling of a familiar genre story. The Paris-based Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz (Three Lives and Only One Death, Genealogies of a Crime) has attached his special brand of surrealism to a gothic thriller tale about a traumatized young woman named Jessie (Anne Parillaud). She keeps waking up either as a paranoid wife on a Caribbean honeymoon with a perhaps untrustworthy husband (William Baldwin) or as a hired assassin on a mission-to-kill in Seattle. Which is the real Jessie? Which identity is the dream?

The "found object" for Ruiz is the cliché-riddled genre script by Duane Poole, who has a history of anonymous television production. When Ruiz was offered this generic screenplay, he saw it as a launching pad for his surrealist amusements. Rather than trying to bury Poole's hackneyed writing, Ruiz plays the risible dialogue on the money, and he has his actors say their lines -- Parillaud painfully, Baldwin affably -- as if they'd never been uttered in umpteen earlier movies.

Here's what the director serves up: a Caribbean honeymoon hot-sauced with voodooish islanders and with the archetypal shifty-eyed spouse (Baldwin) of myriad Hitchcock ripoffs persuading his wife a bit too adamantly that nobody evil is following her, that she's slowly dropping her marbles. The husband may be the rapist who once attacked her. The Seattle section is another open steal, an uncredited sequel to La Femme Nikita, the 1991 French film that made Parillaud famous. Her name might be Jessie, but here's the lovely-legged Parillaud back with Nikita's iconic tiny skirts and lethal gun, confusedly murdering the wrong man.

I've already managed three viewings of Ruiz's work, and I regard it as among the most rewarding film experiences of the year. The more I look, the more I see that there's always something unnervingly off-kilter about the way Ruiz shuffles his movie formulaics. Actually, they are déjà vu episodes that may never have happened on screen, and certainly not quite in Ruiz's weird way. They're like those early Cindy Sherman photos, self-starring movie stills from non-existing genre movies that you could swear you've actually seen. The perils of Cindy, and of Shattered Image's Jessie, are not just film-related; they plug in to the intensely felt dangers of our dreams.

What an unenviable challenge for Lions Gate Films, Shattered Image's distributor, to persuade an arthouse crowd that this teasingly opaque movie is made for them, if only they're savvy enough to crack through the straight-faced generic surface. Unfortunately, hardly anyone in America is familiar with the cinema strategies of Ruiz, whose almost-a-hundred necromantic pictures bounce between Robert Louis Stevenson and Hitchcock, Borges and Orson Welles.

Been there, seen that, some might say of Shattered Image, not realizing that it's no more a straight, conventional thriller than those once-misunderstood now-classics Vertigo and Touch of Evil.

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I didn't just tiptoe across the line from being an objective journalist; I positively leapt inside my story at the Skinner, Inc. auction of vintage movie posters several weekends ago. I'd come to the Heritage on the Garden to inform Phoenix readers about the who-what-when-where of this ballyhooed event. But oh boy, so many posters were really gorgeous and in perfect shape, and wouldn't they look nice on my wall? And wouldn't they make a more exciting investment than sitting down with Fidelity? And wouldn't they . . . ? Before long, I had my little paddle in hand, number 320. And if I was wise enough to stay put for the really expensive stuff (Chaplin posters, a $62,000-bought King Kong), I quickly became a glazed-eyed bidding fool.

Some $2200 later, I went home with original one-sheets from Rio Bravo, Shoot the Piano Player, and Doulous the Fingerman. Did I rip myself off? Auction amateur that I was, I accidentally nodded once and therefore bid an extra hundred dollars! Stupider, I also bid against myself, not grasping that I'd made the previous bid. Fortunately, the kind auctioneer ignored this last blunder.

Oh, the reporting: Next Stop Wonderland producer Mitchell Robbins bought several beautiful Marilyn Monroe posters at very reasonable prices.