Manuel on the Island of Wonders

Part One presents us with three possible worlds. In each world, seven year-old Manoel has a different response to an entreaty from the outside world. Fittingly, in this film in which nothing coincides, the three parts of the story do not coincide with the three-episode structure (the trinity-form recurs frequently in Ruiz). In this case, past, present and future – the unholy trinity or Time en soi – is the film’s very protagonist, variously called ‘long ago’ (Part One), ‘now’ (Part Two), and ‘future’ (Part Three). At the outset, this gives the story an apparent order before digressions take it over.