Raul Ruizas masterful adaptation of the eponymous nineteenth-century Portuguese novel (by Camilo Castelo Branco) evokes the complex intertwined narratives of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens. The core story centers on Joao, the bastard child of an ill-fated romance between two members of the aristocracy who are forbidden to marry, and his quest to discover the truth of his parentage. But this is just the start of an engrossing tale that follows a multitude of characters whose fates conjoin, separate and then rejoin again over three decades in Portugal, Spain, France and Italy.
Mysteries of Lisbon is a Portuguese costume drama film directed by Raúl Ruiz based on an 1854 novel of the same name by Camilo Castelo Branco. The film has won 9 awards and has been nominated 8 times.
Set during the late 18th- to mid-19th-century in Portugal and France in the Georgian / Regency and Victorian eras.
The film painstakingly re-creates the world of nobility in Portugal, France, Spain and Italy. Everyone behaves in a formal manner. They are dressed with great atention to detail. There is an obsessive focus on the codes of gentlemen. Women are given that degree of exaggerated worship that is a form of possession or subjugation: By defining them as above humanity, men deny them simple humanity itself. It is hypnotically beautiful, playful, coiling between past and present. – Roger Ebert
…ravishingly beautiful outdoor scenes, a sense of depth, and close-ups of the actors, who are excellent at conveying what their stilted, poetic dialogue conceals. It’s a little like slipping into a trance and visiting the places and people of another era — not as they really were, but as they wanted to be. And, at the end, when Ruiz uses some more modern cinematic devices to remind us we’ve been in that trance, it’s strangely affecting. – Seven Days
A magisterial meditation on narrative and cinema, Mysteries of Lisbon is the most glorious achievement of Raúl Ruiz’s prodigious career and one of the first cinematic masterpieces of this century. Mysteries immerses us in the unbounded pleasures of plot, character, action, and intrigue, replete with a lyrical score and grounded in a myriad of vibrant performances. – Film Comment
In Portuguese, French and English with English subtitles.
Starring Adriano Luz, Maria Joao Bastos, Ricardo Pereira.
Not rated.
Note: _Mysteries of Lisbon_ is four hours and 26 minutes long. It was originally a six-hour TV miniseries.