A scene from "Mysteries of Lisbon"
Mysteries of Lisbon, the magisterial final film of the innovative and prolific Chilean-born director Raul Ruiz, is a sumptuous unravelling of secrets wrapped in tantalizing stories that gradually interconnect the lives of an ensemble of characters who seduce, betray and defend each other in the years surrounding the Peninsular War.
Adapted from Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco's beloved mid-19th century novel, Mysteries aired in Europe as a six-hour TV miniseries. The four-and-a-half-hour feature version (presented with a 15-minute break), which played numerous festivals including Toronto, is immensely satisfying cinema, filled with intellectual and visceral pleasures that make the daunting running time a breeze to sit through.
When it comes to lengthy screen versions of major 19th-century books, North American audiences are most familiar with the Masterpiece Theatre model. I'm a fan of those PBS series, and so showed up for Ruiz's epic costume drama with hard-wired expectations, which were turned upside-down, in a good way.
Mysteries of Lisbon opens with story of Joao (Joao Luis Arrais), a scrawny 14-year-old who lives in a boarding school run by Father Dinis (the wonderful Adriano Luz), the boy's protector and the film's all-knowing keeper of stories.
Teased for being a bastard, Joao is seriously injured in a fight and as he recovers, drifting in and out of consciousness, he becomes aware of a mournful woman, Angela (Maria Joao Bastos), at his bedside. She is his mother, a countess, whose identity has been hidden from him because the count (not his father) has kept her locked up for eight years.
As the wily Father Dinis sets about reuniting mother and son, he also lets loose the film's first "story within a story," revealed in flashback scenes, which Ruiz presents with a playful, Brechtian touch.
Characters literally sit down to tell or listen to a story, which is sporadically interrupted by the need for refreshment or sleep, then picked up later right where it left off. This self-conscious device and others like it prevent the film from becoming a full-on melodrama by adding small, almost absurdist touches.
We learn that years ago Joao's father – a second son of nobility and thus cash-poor –landed on Dinis's doorstep in bad shape and related the story of his romance with Angela, whose father, a marquis, was bound to marry her off to a count to help bolster his coffers. Dinis intervened, through an underworld connection, to save the child produced by Angela's illicit romance.
Dinis, whom we suspect is motivated by more than priestly duty, indeed has his own skeleton in the closet (to be exact, a skull in a cabinet), and is one of the film's many shape-shifting characters – a pirate who later surfaces as a noble (an edgy and darkly humorous performance by Ricardo Pereira) definitely the most entertaining of the bunch.
Even as coincidences and revelations pile up, we remain emotionally invested in the characters. Early in the film, Angela gives Joao a toy theatre diorama, with paper characters that slide along the stage. Ruiz transforms the toy into what is essentially a title card for each story, and even has cinematographer André Szankowski mimic that smooth sideways movement in some of the scenes.
With Mysteries of Lisbon, Raul Ruiz exits the world cinema stage with a command performance that reminds us that our lives are just stories that will last only as long as there's someone there to listen.
Mysteries of Lisbon (in Portuguese and French with English subtitles) opens at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox on Friday.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Mysteries of Lisbon
- Directed by Raul Ruiz
- Written by Carlos Saboga, based on novel by Camilo Castelo Branco
- Starring Adriano Luz, Maria Joao Bastos, Ricardo Pereira, Afonso Pimentel and Joao Luis Arrais
- Classification: NA