Ruiz’s characteristically discontinuous mode of storytelling is on full display as Marcello Mastroianni portrays four different men—characters who soon pop up in one another’s stories, surreally transfiguring and thus connecting one imaginary space with another. Endlessly inventive, the film offers one story in which Mastroianni’s apartment mysteriously expands in size, while tiny fairies eat his newspapers and drink his liquor while he sleeps—thus quickly devouring 20 years of his life. A political exile from Chile since 1973, Ruiz has continued the innovative filmmaking that put him at the forefront of Chilean cinema in the 60s; his subsequent peripatetic production (in France, Italy, Taiwan, the US, etc.) is paralleled in the multiplicities of identity found in Three Lives and Only One Death.