Mysteries of Lisbon

Mistérios de Lisboa is shown in the United States with the title Mysteries of Lisbon (2010). The film is directed by the extraordinary Chilean director, Raoul Ruiz. Ruiz, who died in 2011, had directed 115 films. (Not a typo--one hundred and fifteen.)

The film is based on a novel by the Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco. (Unfortunately, the novel isn't available in English translation.) It's also frustrating that the DVD available in the U.S. is a shortened version of the original miniseries. (266 minutes vs. 360 minutes. What was left out of the shorter version?)

The film is hard to describe because there are stories within stories within stories. The basic plot--more or less--revolves around a boy attending a Catholic school in early 19th Century Portugal. The boy doesn't know the identity of his mother and father. He doesn't even know his last name.

We eventually meet his mother, her husband, and--in flashback--his father. We also meet elegant women in sumptuous gowns, men for whom dueling is a way of life, and endless numbers of servants who are always watching and listening.

Some mysteries are never resolved. For example, there's a young woman who is the mistress of one of the nobles. When he dies, she refuses to accept any of his inheritance. She turns up again as the wife of an extremely wealthy, cruel man. Then she disappears from the plot. (Was her story edited out, or did she just disappear?)

Ultimately, I think the key to the plot is the priest Padre Dinis, played extremely well by Adriano Luz. He--like almost all of the the characters--turns out to have a surprising past.

Other IMDb reviewers have commented on the costumes, which are incredibly attractive. Two main characters who appear in those costumes are Maria João Bastos as a Portuguese noblewoman and Clotilde Hesme as a French noblewoman. Both of them are extremely beautiful in a European, non-Hollywood way. They appear to have been born to wear those costumes.

At the very end of the movie the young man, now grown, encounters some beggars. One of them tells him, "With the nobility, it's all about their honor. We poor people know these things happen, and we take them as part of life." When I thought about it, those sentences encompasses Mysteries of Lisbon. Nobles fight duels and spend endless effort and resources to protect the honor of their family. One man goes so far as to order the killing of his grandchild, because the child is born out of wedlock. Huge events are taking place around them--the Napoleonic wars, the Portuguese civil war--but what really matters is their rigid code of honor.

We saw this movie on DVD, and it worked well enough. However, almost every frame of the film would be a beautiful still. Many scenes look like lush paintings--Baroque, rather than 19th Century. That's why I believe the film would work better on the large screen. However, if no screening is available, buy the DVD. It's not a movie you want to miss!

Well this is pretty exciting stuff, four and a half hours of Raoul Ruiz back on top form. It's an adaptation of an eponymous 19th century novel by Camilo Castelo-Branco, who is a very famous author in Portugal, the first professional Portuguese author. I think that Ruiz and Castelo-Branco may have been birds of a feather, both known for being extremely prolific artists, Castelo-Branco managed to produce over 260 books whilst this movie is Ruiz's 111th. Superficially one could compare the movie to Wojciech Has' The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) in the way, in the style of Scheherazade, stories generate out of one another. But I think, given the large level of inter-relationships between the stories (what's really being revealed is a web), a more apt comparison may be to Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.

This is quite a dark movie, it opens with the description that "this work is not my child, nor my godson... this work is a diary of suffering". The young narrator says, in comparison to the other children at the religious school he's at, "I never went on outings, nor had holidays, nor presents". His presence at the school and his identity is a mystery to him, he has no last name and is known only as "Joao". His story sprouts into others, which are generally to do with love. The movie is perverse in the extreme, there is a ball at one point in the movie which sums up the atmosphere, the musicians play weird lilting African lunduns for the guests to dance to, which is the latest fashion, along with the pointing of fingers, all the while the guests maliciously gossip. This is in marked contrast to the official Catholicism of Portugal, that one never really gets any sense of in the movie. Although ones honour and reputation may be lost by a single indiscreet kiss, honour is only a thing of extreme superficiality, to be seen as honourable is to be honourable.

The length to which love annihilates the characters in the movie is quite astonishing at times, and brought me to the brink of tears. The Duchess of Cliton is a case in point, a once innocent woman, who describes herself as "mechant", and breaks the hearts of men at will. At one point, she is manipulating a portly baron, who has been nothing but kind to her, and simply bursts out in laughter, revelling in her power. She has to leave the room and then come back. The baron is totally undeterred, just as the young man who Cliton tells she is a bad woman simply refuses to believe her. Her beauty gives her a halo and power that is sheerly wicked. There's also a lot of sexual jealousy in the movie too, and the fires of this jealousy are stoked to ruination, in a way which provokes awe.

There's a sense of romantic progression from early extreme romantic sentiments, pure love, which is shattered by heartbreak, and leads either to misery or to revenge, where the person who has had their heart broken becomes a heart breaker to regain their power. There's a kind of perversity to everything, people are always spying on events from a distance, and a place of extreme duplicity is described as a "temple to sincerity", which in a way it is.

My favourite scene perhaps is set in a grand room in the University of Lisbon, which, it is pretended, is the Portuguese embassy in Rome. Two seats are bought into a room that is bare except for the most magnificent frescoes, a conversation ensues in which one man declares his intention to withdraw from life, he is to take religious orders instead of performing a cowardly annihilation of his own body. At the end of the scene the conversant withdraws and the two chairs are taken away, the man is left with nothing but the frescoes, a metaphor for his memories, which are the only thing that remains for him of the world, he focuses on part of a fresco and collapses. This is how mise-en-scene should be! Ruiz got the director of photography to watch Time Regained and a couple of other Ruiz movies beforehand. This confirms to me a suspicion that Ruiz always maintains ultimate control over the look of the movie. Here it's all trademark shooting, with elements in the extreme foreground of the shot framing action in the background, or vice versa. The camera movements in the mostly interior scenes are also extremely intricate. It's a gorgeous looking movie. The bag of tricks comes out as well, at one point a painting comes to life when Joao looks at it, in a threatful shot that can only be described as gobsmacking.

The movie has a definite colour palette, all shades of gold mostly, with dark greens and greys, yeah it's a stunner.

There is a longer version at six hours that will shortly be screened on Portuguese television. Ruiz in fact prefers the cinema version because the TV version has to have it's tempo fiddled with so that each of the six episodes it splits into ends on something of a cliffhanger. There is also one very powerful scene included in the movie which is not on the TV series, this is where it is revealed what is behind the locked door of Father Dinis.

If you liked this, prepare yourself for more. Ruiz has declared the intention to make a sequel based on the Castelo-Branco novel "livro negro de Padre Dinis" (the black book of Father Dinis). Ruiz is unstoppable, he made this highly intricate and long movie in 14 weeks, during which time he underwent surgery! Mysteries of Lisbon is an extremely special and very significant movie.

This series of short stories set in a world long gone is of course a costume drama, that may therefore deter some. They would be mistaken. It is slow, considered, colorful and in my view a good introduction to the world of our ancestors, who held opinions different from ours, did things in a different way, and got upset about the same issues, yet in a different clothing. Love that is thwarted, wise padres, noble families with poor youngest children and all of that in a heavily draped world - sometimes a bit much. And yet I may recommend that you sit down, do not hurry, leave your perhaps preconceived ideas at the entrance, and enjoy these so many hours of romantic stories.

At four and one-half hours, this is the longest movie I have seen in quite some time. The length will most definitely detract many (as would the costumes and subtitles) from ever sitting down to view this; but I think those with patience and appreciation of "epic"/sweeping storytelling might like this one.

This is the story of Joao, a young orphaned boy (he discovers he's actually a bastard as the story unfolds) living in a Catholic orphanage under the watchful, caring eye of Father Denis. Joao learns of his parentage and where they came from and their circumstances ... and as those stories unfold we learn of different characters in THOSE stories as well.

The film spirals and sweeps and sways with several tangents and characters; but I found it all interesting and actually wanted to continue watching. That each of the stories intertwine and circle each other is part of the "mystery" of the title and parts of the film act and feel as if the entire production is a dream.

It is lovely to look at (gorgeous costumes and sets) and each of the characters has a revelation that continues the "mystery" and the intrigue and drama. The story travels from the streets of Lisbon to Venice to France to Tunis and to Brazil ... it is SWEEPING on a grand-scale as it also spans three decades.

Based on the late author, Camilo Castelo Branco's (who shot himself at the age of 70 b/c he was going blind) novel of the same name, Chilean director Raoul Ruiz has given us his final film (it is masterful) as he died shortly before the film began screening. That it is all so tragic and doomed and romantic is fitting ... as that is exactly what the movie gives its viewer.

I know none of my friends will give this one a shot ... it does require patience. But it is a beauty.

When Raoul Ruiz adapts existing material, he tends to reconfigure the narrative in a playful way, often obliterating all coherence in the process. In his writings on film, specifically Poetics of Cinema, he is quite critical of what he calls central conflict theory. The idea behind this theory is that narrative, especially film narrative, must be built around a single conflict and that every aspect of the plot must build on this conflict one way or another. Ruiz noticed this phenomenon and gave it a name, but it was so common that popular screen writing guides used it as an incontrovertible rule. Poetics of Cinema is devoted almost entirely to explaining and criticizing central conflict theory. Ruiz was never content merely to criticize this simplistic yet ubiquitous narrative structure in writing, however; commentary on it is often embedded in the films he makes. Unsurprisingly, his films intentionally eschew anything resembling this structure but they tend to go even further and offer playful deconstructions of the concept.

Although I can't claim much familiarity with the novel Ruiz is adapting in Mysteries of Lisbon (it apparently hasn't been translated to English yet) it undoubtedly lends itself especially well to his ludic, subversive style. Rather than follow the conflict of a single continuous narrative, Mysteries of Lisbon explores several interrelated narrative strands that complement one another unusually well as they're full of cases of important coincidental relationships and frustrated love affairs. Thus, Ruiz has less to subvert and more to emphasize.

Ruiz's visual style has always been highly unusual. He favors the frequent use of Dutch angles and he often creates startling juxtapositions with his unusual framing techniques and occasional superimpositions. While these unusual techniques are always welcome, they can become somewhat exhausting when they occur frequently. Since Mysteries of Lisbon is unusually long (the version I watched was around 260 minutes) it's perhaps unsurprising that Ruiz manages to space these out carefully enough to draw attention to all the right places and break up the monotony of the more conventional period piece style he favors in this film. Even at its least inspired, however, Mysteries of Lisbon offers far more visual stimulation than the stuffy fidelity of a film by Merchant and Ivory or Oscar fodder such as The King's Speech. Unlike most directors working with similar material, Ruiz captures vast landscapes and baroque interiors with the same effortless mastery. Even the frequent long takes are made more interesting by carefully employed tracking shots.

Mysteries of Lisbon represents the rare combination of a director at the top of his game working with material perfectly suited for his unique sensibilities. Cinema doesn't get much better than this.