Historical drama. Unrated. 4 hours, 32 minutes. At the Chez Artiste.
Raúl Ruiz died in August at 70, although the 100 or so films he made conferred upon him the authority of a man twice his age. He was born in Chile and based in Paris, but was the sort of director who operated as a kind of citizen of the world.
His final film, “Mysteries of Lisbon,” is firmly situated in the manors, forests and broken hearts of 19th-century Portugal, with late jaunts to Italy and France. The geographic locations aren’t as crucial as the artistic mood, which is high romanticism.
It’s not that nearly every shot seems painterly. It’s that light, color and framing turn familiar still images into tableaux vivants of a sort. With Ruiz though, the studious, stilted air of those re-creations dissipates.
It’s not a stunt. When two cousins sit in a dimly lit room playing cards and one — the sexier cousin — regards his hand while slouching toward the camera with his legs apart, it’s both utterly natural and clearly composed. This is the general case for images in a lot of films. But with Ruiz — and this has often been true, even in his modest enterprises — the casual way he practices difficult cinema is breathtaking.
“Mysteries of Lisbon” brings us far inside oil-on-canvas in a way that isn’t imitative. It’s simply, magically a moving picture, what a movie in the 1800s would look like.
The film begins as the tale of a teenage orphan — played by Joao Luis Arrais and, much later, as a young adult by Afonso Pimentel — who learns that his name is Pedro and that his parents lived lovelorn tragedies.
But soon the film has taken up with a handful of no less ancillary liaisons, affairs and trysts among marquises, counts and countesses, one of whom is his mother, Angela (Maria João Bastos). The Catholic-school priest, Father Dinis (Adriano Luz), who brings Angela back into Pedro’s life, has a back story. So does a monk (Jose Manuel Mendes) at the convent where Angela lives.
Ruiz worked from a script adapted from a novel by Camilo Castelo Branco, the prolific 19th-century Portuguese writer. But the film feels as much under the influences of Victor Hugo and Branco’s contemporary, Charles Dickens.
Pedro has a secret benefactor. The priest was once a gypsy, and one of the counts — the sexiest one — was a menace for hire. And when love goes south, everyone turns to the church.
Ruiz was a certain kind of critic’s filmmaker, always inspired, and his inspiration will be deeply missed. In the meantime, there’s this film, which is both the perfect introduction and a fitting goodbye.
