Follows a jealous countess, a wealthy businessman, and a young orphaned boy across Portugal, France, Italy and Brazil where they connect with a variety of mysterious individuals.
This is spellbinding cinema, handled with flair by late Chilean director Raúl Ruiz.
Storytelling of breathtaking scale and grandeur, even if the complex plotting may twist your synapses along the way.
In a last great burst of creativity, he gave us Mysteries of Lisbon, and here it is – all 4½ hours of it – reminding us of Ruiz’s gifts with light and colour, his ambitions with narrative, his sometimes interesting, sometimes frustrating remoteness, and his preoccupations with myth, the avant-garde and 19th-century classicism, all at once.
For those with open minds, the cinema of Ruiz offers enormous and unique pleasure.
Four-and-a-half hours of ambiguous, interweaving fictions fly by in the expert hands of veteran director Raúl Ruiz.
Mysteries of Lisbon is a subtle delirium, and a magnificent late magnum opus from a director who was one of a kind.
A gloriously realised piece, but it is, be warned, a long haul. Not to worry: those good folk at the Filmhouse have scheduled a 15 minute interval.
Compelling for a while, in the end this narrative jigsaw puzzle doesn’t quite justify the time commitment required to make sense of it.
Edinburgh Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Monday January 2, 2012, until Thursday January 5, 2012. More info: www.filmhousecinema.com