The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez

Opera director Peter Sellars’ non-spoken movie is very loosely based on the 1919 German Expressionist landmark film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. That classic is best remembered for how it looks; a vivid depiction of a madman’s world view.
But this is not a remake. At the heart of this movie project is one strong, lucid idea: that the ghastly disconcerting setting of the original movie – a world of fearful contrasts between darkness and light, a world where all the angles are wrong – is not so different from present-day New York City.
Mostly the movie was filmed in the vicinity of Wall Street, with a desire to depict a specific variety of urban hell – that of the white collar. Unlike such movies as Wall Street and Working Girl, which are about speed, power and upward mobility, The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez is about how the downward slope of the economic spiral looks and feels.
Peter Gallagher and Joan Cusack play two young, successful stockbrokers, whose personal and professional lives are, along with the economy, crumbling. They have a series of increasingly bizarre encounters with Dr. Ramirez (Ron Vawter) and Cesar the somnambulist (Mikhail Baryshnikov), and with half a dozen members of the famous Wooster Group.
The score consists of two pieces, Harmonielehre and Harmonium, by John Adams, a frequent collaborator of Sellars.