Raúl Ruiz is probably the chief exponent of intellectual cinema working today; his vision links Borges with Buñuel in a precise and yet expansive exploration of film language. He is also remarkably prolific, and while we may not have kept up with his output-some four films a year since the late seventies-why such recognized masterpieces as The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (PFA 10/78), Three Crowns of the Sailor (PFA 5/83) and City of Pirates (PFA, 9/85) have not found large American audiences or local distributors is a Ruizian mystery. For as Jonathan Rosenbaum writes, the films of this Chilean director now working in France "are hardly puzzles to be solved or strenuous exercises to be mastered, but esoteric pleasure machines that provoke laughter and reveries in relation to Ruiz's campy sense of irony and metaphysical flights of fancy." Typical of Ruiz's depth of cultural contexts and references, Life Is a Dream brings a seventeenth century Calderon play up to date, as it were, in using it as a context for a contemporary intrigue of the mind. Calderon's La Vida es Sueno taught its princely protagonist, held captive in a remote tower, that life is a dream from which we wake when we die; dreams, he found, can be as real (and with real consequences) as life. Ruiz's is a modern-day hero, an agent of the Chilean underground, who uses the Calderon play as a mnemonic device for important secret information. He sits in his own "prison"-a delapidated movie theater-watching everything from Casablanca to Flash Gordon or The Palace of the Arabian Nights to recall the Calderon text and draw his crucial knowledge into the conscious portion of his brain. If all the world's a stage, this movie theater becomes a world, in which performers slip casually from one plane of reality to another, dismissing the distinction between dream and reality, fiction and life, dream and fiction.