Mysteries of Lisbon Blu-ray Review
Pedro Twist.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, January 14, 2012
If Charles Dickens were alive today, there's little doubt he'd be churning out television miniseries with a novelistic flair
rather than "wasting" his time on the passé idiom of the actual novel. In fact, a cursory look at but a couple vestiges of
the
miniseries genre, PBS'
Great Performances and
Masterpiece Theater, finds a slew of Dickens adaptations
stretching back decades. It
seems we can't go more than year or two without a new
Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Bleak House or any
number of other iconic Dickens masterpieces. What makes Dickens'
oeuvre so seemingly perfectly adaptable for
screens, both large and small? Well, first of all, Dickens had the extraordinary ability to introduce a veritable gaggle of
idiosyncratic characters, develop a spider's web of interconnectedness between them, and then let various plots play
out which might highlight any given character for an individual story arc. Dickens almost always had the gimmick of
having a relatively minor character introduced on, say, Page 47, return in the novel's final moments to play a central
role, something that actually might be easier to immediately grasp when portrayed rather than when read, especially if
the casting is exceptional and that "bit role" has an actor who is memorable. There was also a certain none too subtle
subtext in several of Dickens' works which posited a hopeful future for those born into (or at least raised in) the lower
classes, as Dickens loved to create denouements where underlings discovered they were actually better off than they
had ever imagined as a novel drew to its close. That was a populist approach that no doubt played to the erstwhile
dreams of Dickens' large, probably mostly proletariat, audience back in his era, but which still retains a certain luster for
even middle class audiences today. And of course probably no other author of his time captured London in all its gritty,
class conscious "glamour" than Dickens.
Remove that "ond" from the middle of London and replace it with "isb" and
think about someone like Dickens locating a story in Portugal's capital city rather than England's, and you have at least
a fair idea of what awaits you in the labyrinthine
Mysteries of Lisbon, a production which—you guessed it—
began life as a six hour miniseries but has here been whittled down to a relatively more manageable four or so hours
for theatrical exhibition. The film version has had a fairly widely varied critical response, from outright raves to sort of
middling appreciation to "what were they thinking?" incredulity, but there's still a good chance it will be receiving at
least a couple of technical Oscar nominations in a couple of weeks, as it's being widely touted for its production design,
costumes, score and cinematography.
Mysteries of Lisbon is a deliberately
slow, even languid, film that takes its time introducing a Dickensian gaggle of characters, including an Oliver Twist-
esque foundling who's at the center of at least the first part of the story, and the film undeniably takes a certain
requisite amount of patience on the part of audiences to repay their required investment of time.
Those with at least a nodding acquaintance with sprawling epics like Visconti's
The Leopard may have an easier
time slogging through
Mysteries of Lisbon's slow, deliberate examination of the lives of several intertwined
characters in 19th century Lisbon, and in fact this film, the culmination of iconic Chilean director Raúl Ruiz's long career
(Ruiz died last year just as the production was wrapping), is a rather Visconti-esque rumination that wends its way
through elaborately Baroque palatial settings while attempting to illuminate equally Baroque emotional lives of several
characters.
Mysteries of Lisbon is based on a famous mid-19th century novel by Portuguese author Camilo
Castelo Branco, a man who churned out hundreds of novels but whose personal life could have been written by Dickens
himself. Branco was born out of wedlock and orphaned as an infant, ended up doing jail time in his young adult life
(once for exhuming the remains of his first wife), and ending life as a Viscount celebrated for his literary achievement.
Branco's works blend a sort of Dickensian romanticized realism with a sort of nascent quasi-magical realism that would
later become the province of writer like Borges. Ruiz walks a rather precarious tightrope with these two disparate
styles in his film, hinting at the "meta' aspects of magical realism with a series of brief interstitials where any given
scene is shown in brief as being played out on a little toy stage that is on a bureau in the room of the main character of
the first section of the film.
That main character is Pedro (played by João Luis Arrais as a young lad), an orphan who is being raised in the local
religiously supported orphanage by the stern but understanding Father Dinis (Adriano Luz). Pedro has no idea of who
his parents may be, and Father Dinis is strangely reticent to tell the boy anything about his parentage. That all
changes after Pedro is assaulted by some of the other boys in the orphanage and is suddenly visited by a local
Countess, Angela (Maria João Bastos), who indeed turns out to be Pedro's mother. That brief introduction sets a
cartwheeling series of events into motion where both Angela and Father Dinis eventually spill a whole series of
memories out to young Pedro, revealing lives of turmoil and repression, disguise and duplicity, all wrapped up in
sequence after sequence of flashbacks which at times seem to stretch the filmic boundaries of "now" and "then." (It's
no coincidence that one of Ruiz's best remembered films is his adaptation of Proust, 1999's
Time Regained).
Despite its complexity and its multi-timeframe construction,
Mysteries of Lisbon seems to be moving along
relatively traditional
narrative lines for the first half of the film. But when Part 2 starts, some viewers may be thrown for a loop as Ruiz darts
off into a series of
perhaps head scratching tangential storylines that are somewhat equivalent to that Dickensian trope of a minor
character early in a novel
suddenly assuming major importance much later in the story. In the case of
Mysteries of Lisbon, however, some
may question just
how important at least one or two of these characters really are in the overall scheme of things. The film does
eventually wend its way back
around to Pedro, providing some long sought after answers for Pedro as well as some supporting characters. But this
is a film which
requires a more than usual amount of willingness to "go with the flow" on the part of the viewer, for Ruiz casts this film
in a quasi-dreamlike
state where one story dissolves into another, and even some characters morph into others as the story progresses.
This is a film which (again, very Visconti-like) does not give up its secrets easily, and which exists in a rarified, highly
theatrical environment
which frankly may not be to everyone's taste. But for those who are willing to take a deep breath, exhale, and let the
dreamlike ambience
of the film wash over them like a warm Portuguese breeze,
Mysteries of Lisbon provides some extremely
compelling storytelling,
along with some gorgeous imagery and an evocative soundtrack. This dream—like most dreams—may not exactly go
where it might be
expected to, but if getting there is half the fun, this is certainly a very worthwhile journey that delivers an unusually
satisfying experience for
those patient enough to let it work its own special magic.
Mysteries of Lisbon Blu-ray, Video Quality
Mysteries of Lisbon is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Music Box Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in
1.95:1. This feature was
shot digitally and obviously has undergone some fairly radical color timing, in fact desaturization, in post. As such, a lot of
the time, the palette is
intentionally subdued, creating a beautiful
chiaroscuro look which verges on the monochromatic at times. The image
here is sharp,
although Ruiz loves to shoot in mist and fog or through veils, giving the film an ethereal, gauzy quality that may be
mistaken for softness. There
are a couple of artifacting issues present in this transfer, probably the most noticeable of which is persistent crush. So
much of this film plays out
in shadows, as if Ruiz were giving us a visual analog of a dream state, that shadow detail is more important than usual,
and it suffers somewhat
here, no doubt due to the post color timing, which has drained some of the gray scale out of the image. There is also
transitory banding in some
of the misty shots. Otherwise, though, this is a spectacular looking transfer within the intentional confines of what Ruiz and
his DP André
Szankowski were attempting to achieve.
