the confessions
by Douglas Messerli
Carlos
Saboga (screenplay, based on Os Mistérios
de Lisboa by Camilo Castelo Branco), Raúl Ruiz (director) Mistérios de Lisboa (The Mysteries of Lisbon) / 2010, USA 2011
Raúl
Ruiz’s stunning costume drama of Lisbon, Portugal in the late 19th
century was first shown as a series of television dramas before being combined into
a 4 ½ hour film in 2011. As one might expect for such a long work (although
there is no feeling of lethargy in this rather exciting series of tales within
tales), the movie begins quite slowly, almost in a kind of catatonic state;
after the film’s ongoing narrator sets the situation, an elderly British woman
is discovered to be drawing a young boy, who reads nearby as if he didn’t even
notice her. The camera follows him into the hall of the church school, housing
orphans, where once more, oblivious to his fellow classmates, the beautiful
child, named only João (João Luis Arrais)—without a middle or last name, and
rumored to be the son of the school’s priest, Father Dinis (Adriano Luz)—continues to read. A young bully pulls out of the
group of boys, grabbing the book from João’s hands while insisting that even if
his classmate seems different and special, he is, like them, only the son of a
thief or horse trader. João responds in the only way he might, offering the
bully the book but suggesting it might even teach him how to read. The incident
seems to end, but a few seconds later a nun discovers João in the hall
undergoing what appears to be an elliptic fit.
It is at this moment, in its fevered hallucinations
depicting the child’s ill mind, that Ruiz’s brilliant film actually begins. And
although the child’s mind ultimately stops its spin, the movie seldom does.
Indeed, one might describe The Mysteries
of Lisbon as a kind of hallucinatory fable in which ultimately it appears
that all of Lisbon is interconnected to each other, as in tale after tale in
the work devoted to storytelling, we discover its figures living lives that are
nested together a bit like Russian dolls, each containing each.
João’s “fit” and illness after brings him
a woman of the nobility, Ângela de Lima (Maria João Bastos), who gifts the
child a toy box theater (that reiterates the film’s complex plot) and a
portrait of himself, which reveals to the child that he does have visage beyond
the one he has created in his active mind. The woman, so Father Dinis explains,
is his mother, who married to a man other than his father, had to abandon the boy
to protect his life. Although Father Dinis confesses this part of the story to
the boy, throughout most of the rest of the film, he becomes, like Hitchcock’s
famous character, “a man who knows too much,” having been the confessor of nearly
everyone else in the complex grouping of characters. And little by little,
first through the young boy’s search for his paternity, and later through the
interrelationships of other adjacent characters, we grow to perceive the nearly
impossible series of coincidences that life often is.
João (whose real turns out to be Pedro) is
the offspring of another figure of the aristocracy, D. Pedro da Silva (João
Baptista), who like Ângela, alas, is a second-born child, which means in this
hide-bound world of traditions, that neither shall inherit any money, and that
both, accordingly, must marry into wealth. The fact that they fall in love can
only be perceived as an unfortunate tragedy that must be righted by their
parents by marrying them off to others, and, when it is discovered that Ângela
by da Silva is pregnant, the murder of her baby. Enter Father Dinis before his
saintly avocation, a gypsy who convinces the would-be assassin, Alberto de
Magalães, The Knife, to abandon his intentions by paying him a large sum of
money. So does he take on the responsibility of the young boy, but, obviously,
this is only the beginning!
If one were to recount all the dozens of
miraculous—and yes, still hallucinatory, in Ruiz’s almost always surprising
camera work—interrelationships I am sure it would sound much like a outsized
soap opera. Indeed, it is, in terms of plot. But in terms of the fierce loves,
hates, jealousies, gossip, treacheries, lies, and political machinations of the
world in which these figures live, the inter-connected stories seem almost
inevitable, as each tale swallows up the others, so that we lose track of the
original figures only to have them reappear at unexpected moments, drawn back
into the overall landscape as they age. In the process Father Dinis, also an
orphan, discovers his own paternity, and the now older João-Pedro reencounters
the man that might had taken his life at birth, whom he challenges to a duel.
Fortunately, the now dashing pirate Alberto (Ricardo Pereira), cannot shoot
well (a fact which we long ago witnessed in his attempt to kill Pedro’s father
years earlier), and settles the matter, somewhat comically, by himself
confessing to the much younger man (who indirectly changed Alberto’s life) how
he came to love and abandon the beautiful Elisa de Montfort (Clotilde Hesme) before
marrying Eugénia, formerly the mistress of Ângela’s husband, the Count of Santa
Bábara! You see what I mean?
Ruiz, brilliant director that he is, does
not at all attempt to maintain that these almost claustrophobic interrelationships
are anything near realism. And besides, the figures themselves behave as if
they were living in a grand theatrical work, women fainting on the spot for
being called gossips, married women bawdily bedding any handsome man that comes
their way. Men are killed and saved upon whims of fate and higher-ups. And
children are tortured by the incompressibility of the world into which they
have been born. The director maintains a Brechtian distance by simultaneously
playing out these remarkable events in the child’s theater box. In fact, when
he again returns us to the sick boy’s bed at the end of the film, we may even
wonder whether the entire “mysteries” of Lisbon have been truly been an
hallucination of the young boy, lost in the imaginary adventures of his beloved
books.
Has the child not only recreated a
slash-buckling past for himself, but a future that resolves all that he cannot
currently comprehend? Does it matter? Did the world of Scheherazade have to be
true to enchant her listener night after night?
Los Angeles,
November 4, 2013
One of the true masterpieces of this new decade, this film is brilliant! Great write up. The more I think about this film, the more I love it.
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