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.

Portuaguese soap - but a very good movie none the less - Mysteries of Lisbon

It's maybe too easy to dismiss Ruiz's four+-hour project, "Mysteries of Lisbon" (2010?) as a glorified soap, and it does have the complex web of loves and hatreds and betrayals of any soap - but there's a lot more to it, I think, at least from the first half (Part one). First of all, the production quality alone makes it worth watching - Ruiz does not work at an exciting pace, it's leisurely and majesterial, but that tone perfectly suits the material, a story that unfolds gradually - set in mid-19th-century Portugal, basic plot summary: wealthy young woman falls in love with a 2nd son of a Count, but her father refuses to allow the marriage because he will inherit nothing; she (Angela) and he continue their relationship; she becomes pregnant, gives up baby, father of baby flees, and her father forces her to marry a wealthy suitor. She's very cold to the suitor - she has turned inward and against the world - and he treats her cruelly. Meanwhile, boy raised as an orphan, under tutelage of Father Denis, who seems to know everything and everyone; mother finally sees her son - around time the husband dies, confessing his sins - and she forgives him, realizing she never should have married. She leaves her son and enters a convent. Priest playing a central role, as we move toward part 2: how does he know so much? Why is a fierce self-made wealth Lisbon guy defending Angela (Countess of Santa Barabara) against slander? Lots of things to explain and relationships to develop in part two. The film at its best reminds me a bit of great Italian series The Best of Youth in its focus on character and its broad historic scope. Mostly it's appealing because of its unusual - to American viewers - look and setting. It's of the Masterpiece Theater quality - in its ballroom scenes (which reminded me a little of The Leopard), its scenes in the convent and the school and the various mansions, and most of all in the beautiful outdoor sequences, carriages moving across an open plain, for example. It has the strange sense for me of looking very familiar - we've all seen many 19th-century costume dramas - but just slightly off: it's neither England, France, Italy, nor Spain - Portuguese architecture and landscape are just slightly different and interesting to behold. We'll see how well the strand come together in part 2 - some of the elements are pretty confusing (apparently its based on a well-known novel of same title - but the novel probably had a lot more material, and it's a challenge to weave all that into a film or series, even at 4+ hours.)