The Suspended Vocation
Director: Raoul Ruiz
Year Released: 1978
Rating: 0.5
Ineffectual adaptation of the highly regarded Pierre Klossowski book involving bickering priests - it permits one (and only one) piece of directorial flair by Ruiz, and that is alternating between color and black and white (the introduction claims it's a combination of footage shot two different times). Once I got past the visual flip-flopping, this became a shore, and even Sacha Vierny's typically crisp cinematography can't do much to salvage it. With Ruiz, the more off-the-wall he gets the more compelling his cinema is - he's never been one to deal with elaborate storytelling, drama or character development, and the source material appears to need those very same things.
