Raúl Ruiz is a Chilean film-maker who, although feted internationally and with a filmography running to over 50 entries, remains largely unknown in Ireland and Britain. This situation may be about to change. His latest film, Three lives and only one Death, which drew a capacity crowd at the 1996 London Film Festival, is something of a departure for Ruiz. The presence of Marcello Mastroianni in the lead (and wht was to be is final )role makes it his first film to feature a star. Always having managed to secure the participation of respected actors, Ruiz this time also has Marisa Paredes who was recently seen in a bravura performance in Almodovar's Flower of my Secret. Moreover the fact that Pascal Bonitzer – regular collaborator with Jacques Rivette Ð co-wrote the script will stimulate further interest (this is their first collaborative effort since Bonitzer played the lead in Ruiz's 1977 film La Vocation Suspendue).

Perhaps the fact that Ruiz's intellectual and poetic film has, for the first time, acquired what he describes as "a narrative thread, almost" (he rails against what he calls the "central conflict theory" which drives most Hollywood cinema today) will assist (I suggest optimistically) it in finding Irish and British distribution. Moreover the fact that its thematic concerns – albeit possessing more intellectual kudos (Ruiz is an avid reader of philosophy) – share something with those of the Michael Keating vehicle Multiplicity, may help it win the audience Ruiz's work to date has not been in a position to attract.

Mastroianni relishes his multiple roles as Mateo Strano, a morose individual from whom 'fairies' (which live under his kitchen table on 38 rue Maestrich!) have stolen 20 years, Sorbonne Professor, George Vickers, who is one day impelled to leave academia and become a (financially successful) tramp, and entrepreneur 'Lucky' Luc Allamand, who also plays the role of a deceitful butler. This is already quiet a crowd, but Mastroianni's tour de force performance seduces the viewer ineluctably, somewhat giddily, into Ruiz's spatio-temporal labyrinth. The dazzling technical mastery and innovation, allied to the vertiginous multiplication of point of view, and to the intellectual sophistication of Ruiz's exercise are the abundant riches delivered by a film which has the impish sense of humour to draw its teeming multiplicity of strands together in the figure of 'Carlitos', a child sage (who may, or may not be another embodiment of Strano-Vickers-Allamand) who leads the three lives of the film's title to a single death on the 30th of August 1999.

The remainder of this article appears in Film West 27.