posted on: October 19, 2020
It seems to end with his schooldays, and Ruiz leaves us with a puzzling thought that some people may object to as an ambiguity too far. Like much of Ruiz's work, his penultimate film, Mysteries of Lisbon, is based on a work of fiction, though one rather less well known than Stevenson's Treasure Island or Nathaniel Hawthorne's Wakefield, two of the English language classics he has transformed on screen.
3. He then proceeds to dictate his autobiography to a secretary. PG cert, 266 min. Castelo Branco, as prolific in his day as Ruiz has been in his, is no Proust and the film consequently lacks great moments of artistic and personal revelation.
In a last great burst of creativity, he gave us Mysteries of Lisbon, and here it is – all 4½ hours of it – reminding us of Ruiz’s gifts with light and colour, his ambitions with narrative, his sometimes interesting, sometimes frustrating remoteness, and his preoccupations with myth, the avant-garde and 19th-century classicism, all at once. Dir Raúl Ruiz Starring Adriano Luz, Maria João Bastos, Clotilde Hesmé. © 2020 The Hollywood Reporter
The duration is intimidating, but the time flies by in an engrossing movie that covers three generations over the late 18th and early 19th centuries and deals with themes – chance, identity, manipulation, multiple personality – that recur in Ruiz's oeuvre. She gives him a toy theatre which will figure as a framing device for the travels and discoveries in the film. Produced by Paulo Branco, who also made Time Regained and many of Manoel de Oliveira's auteur costumers (another reference point), the film was interrupted by Ruiz's struggle with liver cancer, from which he miraculously recovered to finish the shooting. He's tended by nuns and visited by a handsome woman of aristocratic mien who is introduced as his mother.
Mysteries of Lisbon Review . Raúl Ruiz, who died in August aged 70, left his native Chile following the 1973 Pinochet coup and settled in France to become one of cinema's most prolific and singular film-makers. The theme of memory and intertwined, seemingly endless stories about high society sexual intrigue are common to both films, as well as a sense of the unlimited complexity of life seen through the observant eyes of a great writer. Andre Szankowski's sumptuous cinematography works with Isabel Branco's aristocratic set design to capture the aesthetics of the Napoleonic era, particularly in the magnificent frescoed interiors of the age, which recount still other dramas.
Like Jorge Luís Borges and Gabriel García Márquez (two Latin American writers he admires) and Italo Calvino, he is fascinated by the very act of storytelling, and the movie brings to mind Dickens, Balzac, Hugo and Dumas, but with a modernist twist. Adding to the difficulty of remembering a long cast of characters, who fade in and out of the story, is the fact that many of them change identities in the course of the film and turn up with new names and new actors playing the role. Ruiz enfolds all of this into the puzzle of a single boy’s DNA, and what might become of it: The Tree of Life may be its closest counterpart among recent releases.
Cast: Joao Baptista, Jose Afonso Pimentel, Adriano Luz, Maria Joao Bastos, Albano Jeronimo, Filipe Vargas, Clotilde Hesme, Melvil Poupaud, Lea Seydoux, Ricardo Pereira, Miguel Monteiro. This is Ruiz's way of drawing us into the events we're watching, as well as making us wonder about the connections between the strands of his narrative. The melodramatic story begins with its central character, the good-looking 14-year-old orphan João, who lives at a boarding school near Lisbon run by the kindly, charismatic Father Dinis (Adriano Luz). Ruiz clearly enjoys playing with his characters and often compares them to theater puppets. The title and opening credits are presented over a series of blue-and-white glazed tiles depicting incidents – a duel, an execution by firing squad, a lovers' tryst and so on – that later come to life in the course of the narrative and we're told at the outset that this is "a diary of suffering". © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. The challenge of the film isn’t especially following what’s going on from moment to moment, but figuring out the relationships, both literal and thematic, between its Matrioshka doll episodes.
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