Adapted from the classic Portuguese novel by Camilo Castelo Branco, Raoul Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon has added Toronto to its victory lap of the global festival circuit. After debuting in Cannes and playing various South American festival’s the Chilean-born director’s four and a half-hour period epic will ride its glowing reception here right into the arms of the best-of-the-best New York Film Festival next month. A stunning realisation of Branco’s operatic social novel, which follows the origin story of a teenage Lisbon foundling and the discovery of his unexpected roots, its elegant but emotional style balances the elements of melodrama and ever-deepening mystery at the story’s center.
Often compared to the work of Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust (whose Time Regained Ruiz also adapted in 1999), Mysteries of Lisbon mixes high gothic flavor with the sprawling bustle of the Victorian social novel, and Ruiz manages to replicate that combination with fluid, well-paced storytelling and a flair for heightened, impressionistic visuals. When we meet Pedro da Silva (played in part one by JoÁ£o Luis Arrais as a child and Afonso Pimental as a young man), he is a boy unsure of his provenance but safe in the care of the priest running his school, Father Dinis (Adriano Luz). Pedro has a feeling that something is being kept from him, and sure enough a mysterious, beautiful woman visits him when he falls ill, whispering words of comfort as a mother to her son. That woman is Á‚ngela de Lima (Maria JoÁ£o Bastos), the beautiful, blighted Countess of Santa Barbara, who is kept hidden like a fairy princess by her husband (played with magnetic panache by Albano Jéronimo).
Ruiz gives discrete but coherent narrative layers to this potentially impenetrable plot by letting each character ritually rid themselves of their personal legend, with Father Dinis, who is himself not what he seems, often acting as interlocutor. Through these stories we learn of the doomed love story that led both to Pedro’s illegitimate birth (she and her humble lover 'couldn’t resist the impetuous voice of passion," one of the typically elevated snippets of narration informs us) and Á‚ngela’s doomed marriage. Contrasts in lighting and the use of color delineate what is remembered and what is current, and despite Pedro’s initial, organising narration (the screenplay was written by Carlos Saboga) Ruiz’s camera plays the omniscient narrator, often defining the space and theme in a scene with its deliberate, comported movements, and occasionally seeming to engage his characters in a decorous waltz even as they remain composed in tableaux-like configurations.
Those compositions are staged and lit like old master oils; the stark lighting is Vermeer, the sumptuous detail pure Velasquez. From the plains of Portugal—painted a Granny Smith green and chocolate brown—to the candied drawing rooms, the look of the film enlivens the somewhat mannered narrative, and complements the poise and beauty of the performers. Ruiz creates a lush, persuasive world capacious enough to contain a truly spectacular array of characters (including Clotilde Hesme, Ricardo Pereira, and Martin Loizillon), their secrets, and the search for a self in an aristocratic society determined to define you by your birth.
