The Cabinet of Dr Ramirez

A HORRIFYING STORY, SHOT IN THE NARROW streeets of the financial district on Lower Manthattan. The everyday-problems in Matt's and Cathy's life on Wall Street are darkened by some gruesome events, possibly connected to the mysterious Dr Ramirez and his sleep-walker and side- kick, Cesar. The film takes place sometimes during the early 90s during a recession that shakes the businessworld and weakens people's self-confidence.
Comment:
THE CABINET OF DR. RAMIREZ IS A silent opera from the New York of the early 90s'. After Wall Street: an apocalyptic vision of the young morose stock broker's decline and end, on a Manhattan where the homeless are crawling closer and closer to the steel doors ofthe financial highrisers. This musical drama is pathetic, dizzying, and mysteriously beautiful, set in a surrounding where the bustling streets have been replaced by a naked, futuristic Metropolis. The images and the story brings us back to the 20s' film, but only in order to take a giant step forward: a big parenthesis has been put around the dramaturgy of realistic sound film.
No dialogue exists here, instead ''conversations'' are reflected in the actors' faces. John Adams' music, which also in other circumstances would remind you of film music, does not follow the action in order to emphasize a mood - sometimes it dominates the events on the screen, sometimes the film achieves something completely unexpected in relation to the music.
Peter Sellars uses a fixed camera most of the time, and cuts between long takes, between close-ups and distant, over-sized rooms in slightly distorted angles - the result is at times a theatrical travesty, sometimes magnificent. The dramatic scenes are often cliche, but Sellars stays with them with the over-explicitness of the opera director he is, makes them nearly unbearable and then, reveals a new kind of purism.
It's impossible to interpret ''Dr. Ramirez'' according to its model, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Naturally, there are references, but a number of other works, from film and opera in particular, contribute to break that limitation. We're enticed to look for traces that could lead straight to the heart of the film in this web. The point where everything is pulled together so that we can reveal the mystery of this drama cannot be found, however - after approximately half the film most people start looking for a clue. Instead, the story becomes more and more enigmatic and has definitely gone beyond the explicable when a Tibetan mystic enters - the characters we've been following are no longer what we thought them to be. With the disastrous confrontation between the two worlds, the street and the sky-scraper, they slowly begin to change shapes. Sellars' and Adams' depiction of Manhattan floats somehere between the all too wellknown and the fearfully alien - a memorable and very original film, showing what film art can be. _
CECILIA SJÖHOLM