A four hour movie in which every moment is beautiful

Last night finished Raul Ruiz's 4-hour epic "Mysteries of Lisbon," making four nights of it - actually really like the film, despite many things. First of all, the byzantine plot, full of Dickensian coincidences and improbably reveals, is very hard to follow - it would really help to have read the novel or seen a cribsheet or seen the film twice - and the narrative made more difficult by characters who change appearance somewhat over the course of the long narrative, by overdubbed narrative voices that are hard to identify, and the general confusions of know piecing together the many complex family relations, some of which are not explained until late in the movie. So - don't worry about that, and just enjoy the movie scene by scene and moment by moment. Ruiz does an astounding job with bringing this world, mid-19th-century Portugal (with forays into France) to life. Though the movie is very short on action and though most of the scenes are very simple, constructed around dialogue, often with just two actors in frame, with relatively few closeups, Ruiz frames every single scene beautifully and imaginatively: the scenes in the chateaux, the ballrooms (will remind of Visconti), the occasional scenes out in the open with carriages crossing a wide green expanse (reminds of Renoir), and most of all the dialogues in rooms: in the school early on, in convents and monk's cell, many in rooms in the chateau or a hotel - each one vivid and many having very odd elements that set them off and surprise us: the many eyes watching the dialogue between the priest (Father Dinis) and his mentor, when they think they're alone; the creepy footman in one of the palaces who prances across the polished floors on tiptoes, a scene shot mostly as reflection in a mirror. Some of the court scenes are as strange and elegant as one of those huge Baroque canvases, a Velasquez maybe. Despite my warnings above about difficulty of following the plot, you can get enough of it even on first viewing, and the mysteries do become more or less clear at the end; though it's not as great and profound a series as, say, The Best of Youth, and not as great an adaptation as some of the British adaptations of Dickens, especially the recent Bleak House and Little Dorrit, it's a memorable film and an access, for most Americans, to a time we know little about and to a source not that till now was unknown at least to me.