Mysteries of Lisbon
Chilean-born director Raúl Ruiz returns with another philology experiment in Mysteries of Lisbon. This four-hour European extravaganza follows the entwined destinies of Catholic priest Father Dinis (Adriano Luz), who entered the ministry as a response to worldly chaos, and orphan boy Pedro da Silva (Joo Luis Arrais and the adult José Afonso Pimentel) in 18th-century Portugal. But the film is primarily a pageant of narrative styles featuring Ruiz’s signature teasing points of view—he combines classical melodramatic devices (romantic close-ups, lush landscapes) and avant-garde devices (distorted lenses, oddball angles) with literary and theatrical mannerisms.
Several times, one character says to another, "I’ll explain everything to you," and that’s the Ruiz trope: The narrating voice-overs shift, just as settings leap between time periods as confessions turn to memories, present time gives way to dreams. Ruiz keeps reminding viewers to notice his formal design. The film’s structuring motif is young Pedro’s small theatrical diorama, a gift he receives that inspires fantasies throughout his life. The toy also symbolizes Ruiz’s philosophical approach to life as a series of melodramatic adventures whose only significance lies in our imagination.
If the title suggests soap opera rather than political history, that’s part of Ruiz’s game—but it’s also why this art project feels overlong for its purpose. Never deeper than its frequently alluring surface (creatively lighted in a survey of painterly styles by Brazilian cinematographer André Szankowski), Mysteries of Lisbon takes a long time to relay games of romance, deception, various duels, births, deaths and acts of vengeance. The soap opera becomes slightly absurd, but without that satirical edge that distinguished and justified Luis Buñuel’s films, especially those made in a digressive—and brief— mode.
Ruiz’s period settings and ironic modern suggestiveness resemble Catherine Breillat’s recent Sleeping Beauty, another philological experiment that was strengthened by Breillat’s sexual politics, examining the language and
presentation of fairy tales as the source of women’s romantic ideology throughout time. Breillat’s key image of the ageless Anastasia (Carla Bensainou) hiding inside a grandfather clock and looking out at the world is recalled by Ruiz’s image of young Pedro’s face framed by his toy proscenium. It’s a visual jape, whereas Breillat produced a powerful symbol for the eternal yearning of female intelligence. Sleeping Beauty penetrated social and sexual politics while Ruiz is content to play with "mystery." He falls back on the superficiality of formalism, constantly referencing paintings, drawings and other films (Dreyer’s Gertrud, Visconti’s The Leopard, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon when he’s adroit, Héctor Olivera when he’s treading water).
This deliberate sumptuousness was not a problem when Ruiz made Time Regained, the 1999 deluxe Proust adaptation that was almost a patriotic view of the mysteries of France’s cultural heritage. The cultural preeminence of Proust’s characters and story—plus a gallery of French movie stars—made Ruiz’s game-playing in Time Regainedseem a fascinating form of cultural code. Mysteries of Lisbon doesn’t feel compulsory, and Ruiz lacks storytelling passion. There’s no narrative drive as to what comes next—not even when Ricardo Pereira is on screen as Alberto de Magalhes. A Latin version of Olivier’s Heathcliff, Pereira is dramaticlooking even when the movie is slack.
Ruiz is a gifted imagist who can create immediately vivid single-image scenarios of abundant background and foreground information (such as a room of monks huddled together, listening in on Father Dinis’ family secrets). But such rare shows of brevity mean Mysteries of Lisbon sometimes becomes "Who Cares?"
>>Mysteries of Lisbon
Directed by Raúl Ruiz Running time: 272 min.