The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez plot
Opera director Peter Sellars' penchant for silent expressionist cinema inspired him to create this free-wheeling variation on Robert Wiene's classic Das Cabinet des Dr. caligari. Sellars transferred the data to 1990s New York. The story of two young businessmen whose relationship threatens to come to an end and who, moreover, become entangled in the hallucinatory nets of a strange clochard, is told in a very fragmentary and associative way. Dialogues are left out (we see the characters talking, but we don't hear them), the music - Harmonielehre by John Adams - and fragments of Tibetan chants - propelling the dream structure of the film forward. Thanks to a studied parallel editing, four different stories run simultaneously.