MISTERIOS DE LISBOA (Ruiz, 2010) - Ruiz tells a lot of stories here. There’s adultery galore, several duels (though most don’t go as your would expect), and not one but two illegitimate sons. Three people join a monastery after wild youths, and everyone has impossibly pronounced cheekbones. But as we know, the story’s in the telling, and Ruiz’s seemingly traditional take (with gorgeous lighting) is more interesting than it seems at first sight - luckily, there’s 4.5 hours (6 hours in the TV version) to find out. For instance, he often films around obstacles or through windows, not just to remind us that we’re intruding, spying on private scenes, but also because there often is someone listening in, usually one of the many servants, unnamed extras in the romantic adventures of the nobility. It’s witty, too - the moment that won me over came toward the end of the first part, when a fight scene is seen in a very fragmented fashion through a carriage window.
However, due mostly to admittedly ridiculous expectations, the movie as a whole failed to cohere, and when the visual joke of showing something through a carriage window recurred in the second part, it fell flat. As for the ending - well, I won’t spoil it. Suffice it to say it felt a little like a cop-out, like the author wanted to justify the dime-novel plots he’d served us up all along*. And when the fourth or fifth character cries out that he/she wants to kill him/herself because of love, the silliness of the histrionics becomes tedious. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the movie quite a bit, and happily watched all 4.5 hours, but somehow I’d expected something more transformative, and no matter how lovely the conceit of the puppet theater and how glorious the lighting and how fluid the camera movements, it didn’t reach that level (for me).
And here I’m doubting again. Thinking of a shot where Padre Dinis sit in the center of a shadowy web. Or, speaking of spiders, of Clothilde Hesme’s Black Widow. Of how love notes are fetishised and ridiculed at the same time. The elements are definitely memorable, but the whole slips away.
*I’m assuming here that the ending is taken from the book, but since it has no english-language wikipedia page, I could be wrong
P.S. Stray thought: was being a shoe-maker really held in such low esteem in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Portugal?
