Three Lives and Only One Death

In this idiosyncratic puzzle film, Mastroianni plays three different characters, each with his own set of multiple identities: a married man who left home one morning only to spend two decades in an enchanted apartment across the street; a lecturer at the Sorbonne who abandons his post to become a beggar; a butler waiting on a young couple in a mansion they've mysteriously acquired. Or are they all the same man? Drawing on stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Isak Dinesen, Raul Ruiz fashioned a delightful pattern of overlapping plots -- fantasies of lives left behind, people seduced and abandoned, and personas taken on. Mastroianni's penultimate film stands as a tribute to the range and charisma of the great actor, who died the year the film premiered.