Review: Mysteries of Lisbon *BAFICI Screening*

Dir. Raul Ruiz
Portugal
272 Mins
2010

Seen in a single sitting, a film like this, with all its branching paths and anecdotal asides, all its subterranean currents and linked characters, the whole verbal spill of the thing, all of it plunges down on us as the running time nears its final minutes, our journey as viewers culminating in our opportunity to stand amidst an ocean of unremitting narrative and realize that we have become surrounded by another world and have lost sight of our regular lives, the faces and events that have marked our progress a fictional fog that envelops our bodies.

Raul Ruiz conveys something like the physicality of storytelling. The plot he gifts us with has tangible mass. Indeed, Mysteries of Lisbon has so much plot that it eventually detonates the idea of plot, becoming impossible to synopsize, condense, explain, or divide into constituent parts. We cannot relate what happens without retelling the entire film. Characters begin act-length speeches with variants of “let me tell you how it happened,” and we are promptly treated to their tales, usually summaries of the crucial cross-roads in their backstories. We open with an orphaned boy in a 19th century Portuguese boarding school whose life is secretly guided by the enigmatic Father Dinis. We end with the same boy, now much older and displaced to Brazil, at which point I was reminded of Ryszard Kapuściński’s non-fiction article “Metropol Hotel,” not because of the content or the descriptions, but because of the insight that wandering travelers, far from home and rootless, families sunk into the indistinct past, are often like unexplored caves of novelistic scope, their lives vast and tragic.

Long takes have beginnings, middles, and ends. The camera swoops through hallways, explores different rooms, finds witnesses discreetly eavesdropping, rises to catch an imprisoned woman perched on a window and falls at the calling of her jealous husband and captor. Characters move with measured and even rehearsed pace, the life of the courts a form of public theater, a stage for performed etiquette and choice irony. Some characters even don outfits and exotic personalities, constructing new selves to weave through the hidden passages of tormenting gossip and delicate intimacy, reshaping the fate of those around them by tweaking the hidden mechanisms that rule their futures. Yarn-spinners unspool their knowledge before us for the delectation of our hypnotized gaze. Mysteries of Lisbon gives the impression of being made as it is watched, its narrative turning and transforming as plots bounce off each other to carve new depths or trace new directions. When one characters tells a story to another, we stand alongside the latter and participate in the act of listening. Eventually, we are immersed in the film, another curious pair of ears catching the manifold tales fluttering through the air and suggesting paths for the imagination.

Guido Pellegrini

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I might look like a cinephile, sound like a cinephile, and watch films like a cinephile, but I'm not sure that I am, in fact, a cinephile. I like to think of myself as some sort of itinerant (and probably lost) traveler who has chosen film as his preferred medium of imaginative flight, and who has in turn chosen imaginative flight as his preferred method of thinking.

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