Mysteries of Lisbon

I drove to Edina to see Raul Ruiz’ Mysteries of Lisbon. The film is 4 ½ hours long and there was a handwritten poster on the theater door advising as to the film’s length and that “no refunds would be given after the first half-hour.” At the intermission, three of the nine people watching the picture decided to leave. I heard them talking about the film in the lobby. “Should we go?” a woman asked. “It’s rather andante,” the man said. The other woman said: “We aren’t getting any younger.” The man said: “Life is too short.” And they departed. The comment about the film’s alleged andante pacing was witty, but inaccurate. In fact, The Mysteries of Lisbon is so densely packed with intertwined narratives and characters intricately related to one another that watching the movie is an exhausting experience. It is close to impossible to keep track of how the characters are linked together and the film’s structure, which involves many different narrators telling stories nested inside one of another like the shells of a carved Russian doll, adds to the difficulty. Individual sequences are shot in a lucid, relaxed style that is very clear and classically (almost statically) rational, but the relationship of the parts to the whole is dauntingly complex. It would take several pages of tiny print to outline all of the lurid plots and subplots that intersect in this film. Ruiz was one of the great innovators in world cinema and the film is remarkable in achieving a sheer narrative density that I have never witnessed in any other movie. Indeed, the film is so intricate and requires such close attention that it could not be shown on television, broken into three or four parts – the audience would never be able to recall how the story has progressed to the point where the new episode begins if the film were presented in this manner – and the story is so unfathomably complex that it could not be reprised with introductory flashbacks preceding each episode. For better or worse, this film probably has to be seen in a theater in one sitting. Ruiz adapts a 19th century Portuguese novel that seems to be about a boy named Joao living in a Lisbon Catholic boarding school. The boy seems to have no parents; perhaps, he is an orphan. The kindly Father Denis is his benefactor and, as the film progresses, gradually reveals to him the mysteries of his paternity. But within an hour, the movie shifts focus and becomes a narrative about Joao’s mother.. After the intermission, the film shifts perspective again and embeds the narrative of Father Denis’ own father, a monk living in a seaside monastery, employing a series of flashbacks involving a Byronic slave-trader and pirate, Alberto de Mongalhaes. Mongalhaes is romantically involved with the savage Duchess of Cliton whose story is also shown to us in an intricate series of flashbacks; the film ends with the death of Joao in Brazil, old and devastated by the horrors that he has uncovered about his pedigree and the people to whom he is related. With its languorous tracking and reframing camera motions and its sumptuous landscape exteriors (and lavish amber-hued interiors), the film looks like a high-budget version of Masterpiece Theater, but, ultimately, the picture’s icy neo-classical trappings conceals an extraordinary avant-garde sensibility. The film is so post-modern that it has abandoned citation and allusion – there are no ironic quotations marks bracketing any of the hyper-romantic subject matter: duels, concealed adultery, madness, attempted murders and infanticide, characters who impersonate one another and appear in a dizzying array of disguises, all of this is presented with complete, bland lucidity, beautifully and naturalistically acted. It is impossible to determine what is foreground and what background; important characters suddenly vanish to be replaced by other characters who fleetingly occupying the center of focus; whose story are you watching? What is the main plot? What is the subplot? Who is really the hero? Who the heroine? It is impossible to answer these questions – what matters is the endlessly self-replicating and self-regenerating narrative, a vast web of coincidences and interactions animated by lust, greed, or revenge somewhat like the plots of those archaic serials directed by Louis Feuillade (Judex or Fantomas for instance). Ruiz often suppresses the action, keeping it offstage or filming violent or important events from idiosyncratic angles, the décor is subtly strange and hallucinatory as are the fog-dimmed landscapes; Ruiz’ camera inscribes stately curiously complex motions through the brick-a-brack or wet autumnal exteriors; often he uses peculiar points-of-view and there are inexplicable oddities – for instance, a prancing butler that Mongalhaes periodically beats for the fun of it. Blindness is an important symbolic motif: like Oedipus, no one, it seems, can unravel the enigma of their origins and once the truth, or part of the truth is known, it seems inevitably catastrophic. Many of the scenes involving the venomous Duchess of Cliton, who uses her sepulchral beauty to cut a swath through the lives of the male characters are intensely dramatic, even frightening in their intensity. Further, Ruiz uses formal parametric devices to control the mise-en-scene, varying these techniques from scene to scene – the film is so long that Ruiz needs to be fantastically inventive in order to maintain the pictorial energy of the picture, and prevent its rhythm of editing, from sinking into tedium. Accordingly, he invents innumerable curious and clever narrative devices. One example must suffice for many: in the flashback narrated by Father Denis’ own father, we see an adulterous couple in their bedchamber. The couple is shown in repeated shots that are partially masked by drapes or other impediments in the near foreground. The camera seems handheld and the effect is like a horror film – someone is watching the characters concealed very near to them in the room, thus the half-masked POV shots. (One obsessive motif in the film is eavesdropping and people peering through windows to watch one another – no emotional cataclysm ever occurs in The Mysteries of Lisbon without an impassive servant girl or butler looking on.) We wonder: who is peeping on this couple? Then, the silver surface of a mirror that is empty of reflections suddenly reveals a skull peering out through the glass – we see the couple to one side of the picture. Figuratively, the couple is haunted by death – and, indeed, in a few minutes, the woman will die in childbirth, and her son, Father Denis, will end up with her skull in a reliquiary that he keeps at his night table. The film is extraordinary and Ruiz’ own death a few weeks after it was edited is a tragedy.