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.
Review of Genealogies of a Crime
