In Paris from the Pinochet takeover on and more applauded there than in the Americas, Chilean Raúl Ruiz has been a favorite of the New York Film Festival selection committee for three decades. Penultimate Mysteries of Lisbon ran at the 2010 festival, and he is sort of twice represented at the current edition. Epitaph Lines of Wellington was completed by and credited to his widow and constant editor Valeria Sarmiento, while in Night Across the Street/La nuit d’en face/La noche de enfrente he speaks from beyond the grave.

Via Skype, co-producer François Margolin felt that Don Raulito intended this film to be shown only after his passing, which he foresaw as imminent (from complications of a second cancer) but which caught everyone else off guard.

The film “is a summary of his work, moving and funny.” On top of themes common to the large oeuvre, and of narrative eccentricities, it embodies a constant reminder of, but not terror at, death, a concern blazoned in title and tale of his 1996 Three Lives and Only One Death, where, in his next-to-last appearance, Mastroianni takes on four rôles.

Indeed, titles alone throughout the director-screenwriter’s filmography point to his fascination with shifting character shapes, jumps in time and place and, befitting the son of a ship’s captain, coasts, seas, ships and pirates.

The surrealistic coming together and separating of protagonists -- with one actor playing different characters, or the same character played by different actors -- the proscenium theater frames, the overlapping though distinct storylines, inexpensive bold lighting and camerawork, often cross the line to become confusing for the viewer. So, too, Night, even if this final statement can be satisfying for those willing to abandon demands for rationality and, with his 1987 title, accept that Life Is a Dream.

Ruiz partly based this his final dream on stories by twentieth century “Imaginist” writer Hernán del Solar (from whom, the title as well). But, jokester or mystifier that he was, at various other times he claimed a source in the father of an old friend, or in another friend’s childhood, or his own.

Celso Barra (Sergio Hernández) carries an old-fashioned alarm clock to remind him of time and of pills. He sits among young students in the dual-language poetry classes of friend Jean Giono (Christian Vadim), who, infatuated with the port city’s name, had left his family to relocate in Antofagasta and denies knowledge of a same-name novelist in Paris.

Don Celso is about to retire, or be retired, from the office in which he has worked for years doing nothing. He returns evenings to the pensione of Doña Nigilda (Valentina Vargas), who has an eye for him but in a blink shifts it to new arrival Rhododendron, or Pedro Rolo, whom she introduces as a nephew but who Celso senses is the assassin he knows is tracking him.

There are shifts to the pasts, distant and intermediate, where music-history whiz kid Celso (Santiago Figueroa) shadow boxes with another youngster, has philosophical conversations with Long John Silver (Pedro Villagra) and Beethoven (Sergio Schmied), and recounts contradictory stories about his parents’ deaths. Some years later, the young man may or may not be the bicyclist that the older Celso informs about buildings to come in the future, and he or his young friend, or both, may or may not grow up to be the man with the showy flower name who may or may not be the killer stalker.

“May or may not,” because the story is experienced better than explicated. The boarding house in which Celso lives with his ships in bottles and assorted curios, also houses an uncommunicative old alcoholic, a bicycling singer Rosina (Chamila Rodríguez) who lusts after the supposed killer, and possibly others who are, on one level, already killed or suicides in a house halfway between this world and the hereafter reached through a gun barrel.

The readiness is all. Viewers prepared to float in the seriocomic allegory-dream will find what they will. Unfortunately, confused and impatient others may drop out, and miss out on the fun.

(Released by Cinema Guild; not rated by MPAA.)