Genealogies of a Crime (1997) User Reviews

Can the surreal be made to seem real?

[fisherforrest · 5/10 · 10 July 2002]

Briefly, a woman lawyer for a young man accused of killing his psychiatrist aunt gets him acquitted, falls in love with him (?), becomes his victim for blackmail, and finally kills him, apparently along with all of his friends. What I am about to say further reveals a sort of "surprise" ending, so please don't read on until you have seen the film!

It's all a flashback, as the lawyer tells her lawyer the story while in prison awaiting trial. On the surface, that's the story, but be warned that when you venture on this film, you enter a nightmare world where little is what it seems; all is indefinite. The adjective "surreal" is apropos, but the writer seems at once to be poking fun at the "science" of psychoanalysis, while "psychoanalysing" the audience. One of the "psycoanalysts" (I omitted the "h" intentionally)opines that everyone acts out a story from the past that is endlessly repeated. He summarises from an old story: the lawyer was the ghost of the aunt, seeking revenge on the man who killed her.

Catherine Deneuve is certainly fascinating enough to be both quick and dead, but is there any real sense to all of this? Probably not. I think the director was poking fun at all of us, while indulging in some wild and fascinating camera perspectives. If this sort of thing delights you, you'll love this film. Frankly, it's not my cup of tea, and I rated it a 5 of 10.

Defenestrating Cats

[tedg · 26 April 2006]

"Narrative syndrome;" "Mnemosyne;" "Truth is absorbed through the eyes."

I haven't seen many of the large number of Ruiz films. But I have seen some on both sides of this in terms of engagement.

You should know that these are first essays on the nature of reality and fiction in fiction. Only as a second matter are muscle and concurrent elaboration added. Ruiz isn't interested to go as far as, say "2001" (or for that matter "2046") in taking the armature of narrative shuffling and make us care.

So, as a friend says, you can see the plumbing. In fact, it is little but plumbing, more like "The Hyposthesis of the Stolen painting" where every element was there only to drive the metanarrative with the narrative itself almost mute.

Not so in "Comedy of Innocence" or "Time Regained" where he makes the narrative obvious. With the former, we actually care about Huppert's character. Here, the central character is a Go board, where (if you watch closely) the patterns of what surrounds what change in subtle ways. This is the partner in a sense to "Hero" which is cast as a game of Go in the rain. But we forget.

If you choose to see this, dear friends, choose to approach it as an exposition, elaboration or fold on one of your favorite already layered projects. Because though it has a Latin engine, it wears a French straitjacket.

The notion here is that the story captures the person and changes her, not the other way around. So if you want to know anyone, you need to know the genealogy of their story. In watching this, the characters are attached to stories, not to bodies. So several characters have more than one body and the other way around.

Every single woman in the thing is one woman: all are redheads except the second being of Deneuve's making, who only differs in being blond. She (the blond) is our designated detective. The film merges with paintings, tableaux, games, courtships, therapies, rituals, and at least one ancient campfire tale.

For me, this was the other side of the warring narrators in "2001" with which I suggest you view it.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

French cinema at its worst.

[gridoon · 4/10 · 24 January 2004]

There may be some interesting ideas about fate and chance here, but they are so deeply buried beneath a talky, uninvolving, boring, confusing and monotonous film that they aren't even worth thinking about. There's a distinct lack of emotion and interest to this film...and you'll have to struggle to get through it in one sitting. Worth seeing (a figure of speech) only for Deneuve's ageless beauty. (*1/2)

"You'll be me and I'll be you...... Beep!"

[Xparanoid · 9/10 · 12 December 2004]

If some directors make the cut into stardom and acknowledge maybe this isn't the gold for Raoul Ruiz. This great chilean director is one of the best on making a film completely out of new processed lines of ideas, brave imaginary and a perfectly narrated line of events that are shocking sometimes and very recreational through the whole story. In this film Catherine Deneuve shows her grace with a comfortably effortless acting being a legal attorney who solves a mystery on an assassination of a remarkable psychologist. Sometimes you see her good side, the intrigued professional that tries to form a bind with her young client Rene, the first suspect on the murder of his aunt the psychologist, but sometimes you get to see nothing but the real game. That is the true central object of the plot, about how the truth come to reveal to ourselves by being other people, or better said, by placing ourselves in other's perspective. Big twist at the end, and it was before our eyes every time.

*notice the great adjustements on the camera lens through the film. Some filters and a half of screen out of focus with traveling at the same time!!

Living a story

[Pan32 · 7 November 2011]

Généalogies d'un crime (1997) Raoul Ruiz presents a whimsical comic send up of any number of Hollywood crime flicks from Hitchcock on down, shuffling the deck of stock situations and dealing a hand that parodies the psychiatric profession along with the infinity of detective fiction, reinvigorating the shopworn genre by seasoning it with oriental spice and pseudo physiological insight that, while making the head spin unraveling the scarlet threads, entertains chiefly with the wonderfully eccentric performances of Michel Piccoli as head of the barmy Franco- Belgium Psychiatric Society and Andrzej Seweryn as the clinical observer of their folly and curator of his museum Mnemosyne in which he preserves the record of the genealogies of crime and expounds on his theory that we all live a story, the story here reenacted, is the Chinese folk tale of the young man that after killing a woman takes shelter in the home of her ghost who finds her revenge, given in voice over at begriming and end of the film along with a view of a Go board shown from time to time displaying the movement of "stones" (here plastic chips). Great fun and entertainment.