Speaking to an interviewer in 1993, Raul Ruiz explained, “My films are not fiction films but about fiction.” This statement comes as close as any to defining this prolific and playful Chilean-born filmmaker; still, it deals with only one aspect of his varied career.
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I can’t think of a better introduction to this major but underappreciated filmmaker than his Portuguese feature Mysteries of Lisbon, which opens this week at Music Box. The last film he managed to complete (a final feature, La Noche de Enfrente, is currently in post-production), Mysteries of Lisbon is rich with coincidences, plot twists, multiple narrators, disguises, and flashbacks-within-flashbacks. Every major character possesses at least two identities, and the story—which hopscotches around Europe in the early 19th and late 18th centuries—ropes in the Napoleonic Wars, pirates, a woman hellbent on avenging the death of her twin brother, and at least four different love triangles. Above all, Mysteries of Lisbon is about the mechanics of storytelling and imagination—in other words, how fiction works.
A few days later, Father Dinis takes João for a walk and they pass by a mansion. The priest explains that the woman who visited João was in fact his mother—but her husband, whom they encounter in the mansion’s courtyard, is not João’s father. This is the first in a chain of revelations involving João, his parents, his grandparents, Father Dinis and his family, and such seemingly peripheral characters as the roguish part-time pirate Alberto de Magalhães (Ricardo Pereira) and the mysterious French widow Elisa de Montfort (Clotilde Hesme), not to mention the characters’ past selves.
Though Mysteries of Lisbon closes with a blinding flash of light, its ending is even more shadowy and mysterious than its beginning. The adult João (played by Afonso Pimentel) eventually discovers that the events and circumstances of his life are merely the product of other people’s intrigues, unrequited loves, and vendettas. Having found himself in a terrifyingly orderly world where everything is related and all mysteries have been solved, he realizes that he has no reason to exist. “My life no longer made any sense,” João deadpans at the end; if it were real, the neatness of fiction would drive a man to despair.
Directed by Raul Ruiz
