User Reviews

It opens with H, a protagonist whose name evokes the nightmarish fictions of Franz Kafka, explaining that he woke up in a parked car with no recollection of arriving. The car is not operational so he walks across a field where he finds a strange man playing some variation of Snakes and Ladders. Although the man tells him that he has been sitting there playing the game for a long time and it isn't for two players, H is unwittingly sucked into the game. He becomes aware of his involvement with the game only two hours later when the game player calls to him on a Paris street.

H tries to tell the mystery man that he has an appointment and he cannot play but he is told he has already begun playing. The next phase of the game involves charting and solving the labyrinth of the city streets. As the film continues the game constantly changes scale and the goals of H and the other man change along with it; this is just as confusing to H as it is to the viewer. Just when it seems that H has escaped or wandered away from the game his opponent appears to talk about strategy again. To further complicate things, H sometimes falls asleep and his dreams (which almost definitely occur within a film which is a dream itself) reflect the things that are happening to him. As this continues, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish the new dreams from the reality of the film's main narrative.

This film features some very ambitious but very obviously low budget effects that I found to be quite effective. Some however, might find them to be somewhat silly, in fact well known critic Jonathan Rosenbaum compared them to Ed Wood.

I haven't really formulated a complete interpretation of the film yet but I do have a couple of half formed ideas about it.

Idea 1: Obviously Snakes and Ladders is at least partially about maps and the way people use them. The film implies that people need maps to understand the world and make places seem more familiar. People fear the unknown and having a map of a place makes it less unknown and hence less threatening. At the same time, however, no map is complete and even the best map is no substitute for first hand knowledge of a place. Like every human endeavor, cartography is an attempt by humans to master their environment and increase the power and influence of the human race but its true success is sometimes hard to measure. This last point is made especially clear in a scene in which the mystery man mentions that a certain mountain range which has been found on maps for over one hundred years only exists on paper.

Idea 2: It's no coincidence that the film starts off with an unrealistic setting/incident. The events that make up Snakes and Ladders are a dream, but this dream has larger significance than most; the game in this dream represent existence itself. At the beginning of the dream H is pulled into a game he has no understanding of much the way a newborn is pulled into a world he has no understanding of. As H progresses he gets tips from the other player and he begins to understand something about the way the game works. However, as the game continues new complications arise and he as he understands more he begins to realize that there is still much he does not understand. This is a metaphor for growing up and facing life's challenges. Ultimately the game goes beyond anything H or even the more experienced player can understand just as in spite of all the collected efforts of every human society there are things we still can't explain. Thus the dream teaches H something about the human experience and earns its subtitle une fiction didactique à propos de la cartographie which is of course somewhat humorously referenced in the film when the narrator says, "He is the victim of the worst kind of nightmare, the didactic nightmare."

I'll have to give both of these ideas some more thought but I think they both add to my own appreciation of the film.

This combines in its 30 minutes several things that appeal to me.

• mystical geographies navigable my meaningful chance. Maps as alchemic realities, codas of a larger maze of which in life we only recognize the corridors. This is probably what people refer to as Borgesian in this, though the tradition stretches further back. The legend of Thibault de Castries, megapolisomancy, Baudelaire and his absinthe notions about flaneurs, the detached observer who walks the city in order to experience it. Of course The King in Yellow. Fritz Leiber. Dada and their elaborate dandy games where Paris is wandered around according to maps of London or Vienna, in hope to unlock some secret communion.

• games of chance with hazardous stakes. Where the card player who folds is removed from existence.

• raw cinematic tools at the hands of an intelligent film mind, where film is not a multibillion gloss, but a precious alchemic concoction, that intimates how you could brew it yourself. Some of the effects are inadvertently cheap, others are captivating like that flickering hand of god tossing dice in the sky. Flickering as though to suggest the cinematic, which is the hand of the filmmaker shaping his world.

• perception of the mechanisms that control reality, and what hides behind the apparent. That there is more to what we see, exactly because we don't see it. Here the distinction is between map and the corresponding world that it maps, between representation and reality, idea and the experience it refers to. The vantage point from where it is made is from up in the sky, from where the cartographer gets his bird's eye view. His panopticon from where the maze becomes visible.

Ruiz weaves all of this together in a stratagem hinting at mystical insights, a 'didactic nightmare' as the title says. The whole of Paris becomes a board game, where movement of the players in the maze is preordained by the chance tossing of the dice. Then France, and Europe.

Having understood worlds within worlds and how one informs the other, Ruiz asks the one question that matters. Where do we choose to finally inhabit, the map or the actual thing? The decision once made, we are hurled outside as a means of sinking within. As in Solyaris, only with primitive means.

The voyage outwards as a representation of one inwards in which the protagonist finds himself inhabiting the mind (where maps are born, illusions of the real as in Solyaris), the idea than the actual thing. A clever touch that expounds on this, is that by submerging himself in that which is meant to orientate, by navigating what is in front of his eyes through an artifice, an intermediate, he eventually loses himself.

The palpable sadness comes from the realization that the unity with the cosmos is only possible down here, in the worldly. There is no cosmos in the mind, only ideas and references about it. Which is one of many conundrums of the spiritual endeavor; how to escape the worldly bonds yet remain open to the world. How to escape the self for example while retaining this one consciousness?