Shattered Image

Ruiz’s final foray into the pulp genre (and his American debut) is a shadow play in doubles: Jessie (Anne Parillaud) is a gorgeous assassin hired to kill Brian (William Baldwin)… or is she a dream of Jessie, the rape victim vacationing in the Caribbean with her husband (also Brian)? Ruiz and playwright Duane Poole turn a flimsy, paperback-worthy premise into a Rorschach-blot interrogation of selfdom and the unconscious that reflects the filmmaker’s prior work: one Jessie calls the other a “dream,” while the other replies that she’s “a fucking nightmare.” A complicated co-production, Shattered Image was described by its maker as “an American accident”—unfortunate given the mounting vertigo achieved by its unforgettable location photography (courtesy of legendary cinematographer Robby Müller, shooting in Jamaica and British Columbia). Print from the collection of La Cinémathèque de Toulouse.