REVIEW: Epic Mysteries of Lisbon the Movie Equivalent of Sinking Into Good Book

Plenty has been written about the novelistic pleasures of long-form television: Making your way, episode through episode, of a series like The Wire or Treme isn't so different from the way American readers waited on the docks for the latest installment of Dickens to come in, needing to know if Little Nell died or not. Long movies can offer that same kind of narrative luxuriousness -- except so few people make four-hour-plus movies, especially today. That's what makes Raúl Ruiz' Mysteries of Lisbon -- which clocks in at four and a half hours -- both a novelty and a treat. It takes a certain amount of discipline to watch a picture like that in one go, but that's part of the fun. It's like stretching a muscle you'd forgotten you had.

Actually, Mysteries of Lisbon -- which is based on an 1854 novel by Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco, and follows the interlocking travails of aristocrats during the Portuguese civil wars -- was originally intended as TV soap opera, and a six-hour version was shown on European television. But it has also done reasonably well -- for a four hour movie, at least -- at the European box office, and now moviegoers stateside will have a chance to see it in limited release. If it's not playing near you, you can of course get almost as much pleasure out of watching it at home, eventually, on DVD. (Just not on your iPod.) But if you have the chance, I'd recommend seeing the picture in one piggy stretch, or even two piglet ones, if only to reconnect with that ancient and now practically outmoded convention, the attention span.

Mysteries of Lisbon begins with one central mystery, before delving a series of smaller, nested ones. Young Pedro da Silva, who goes by the name of João -- he's a preadolescent when the movie opens, and he's played by João Arrais -- is unhappily serving his term at a boarding school, believing he's an orphan. The movie opens with the epigraph, "This story is not my child or my godchild. It is a diary of suffering." That makes the story sound gloomier than it is, though there is lots of doomed romance, selfish behavior and cruel scheming. It really is, in the end, a soap opera, a form that's designed to chronicle all manner of human pleasures, foibles and challenges.

But young Pedro is wrong about his orphan status. Under the watchful eye of Father Dinis (Adriano Luz), who runs the boarding school, he comes to learn that his mother, Ângela de Lima (Maria João Bastos), an impoverished countess, is still alive, though she has been virtually imprisoned by her cruel husband, the Count of Santa Bárbara (Albano Jerónimo), who is not, incidentally, Pedro's father.

Of course, that's barely the first half-millimeter of the iceberg in a sprawling yet miraculously controlled story that also features repentant women who enter convents, shadowy characters who assume multiple identities, and tall, strapping rogues who belch. Young women in silken dressing gowns point tiny pistols at men who've wronged them. Ladies in eveningwear that makes them look like cake-frosting flowers huddle together to chatter and gossip and manipulate. There's misbehavior and forgiveness right and left, as well as a degree of political intrigue. (It's the only recent movie I can think of that would have occasion to name-check Charlotte Corday.) There's even a richly decorated treasure box that holds a -- well, there's no way I'm going to tell you what's inside.

With The Mysteries of Lisbon Ruiz has pulled off a work that's both grand and intimate, as if he'd seized on the seemingly paradoxical idea of building a mansion-sized dollhouse and made it work. Ruiz was born in Chile but has lived in Paris since the 1970s. He's made more than 100 movies in the course of his career, though not many of them would be familiar to American moviegoers. (The exception might be his 1999 adaptation of Proust's Time Regained, starring John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve.) Here, Ruiz and cinematographer André Szankowski work in the fairly straight tradition of the period drama, but they never corset it too tightly. The picture breathes as it moves, even though the pace here is definitely stately. Ruiz appears to have had lots of fun with the movie's little visual touches: The reflection of illicit lovers is captured in a tiny mirror image; the face of a storyteller spinning out a tale of woe looks back at him, and us, from the surface of a cup of tea. Ruiz has treated the world of culture, with a capital C, as if it were a Sears-Roebuck catalog of great ideas waiting to borrowed: He takes a few pages from Vermeer's soft-glow chamber lighting and Corbet's way around a misty landscape.

The second half of Mysteries of Lisbon isn't as dishy as the first: People we've come to be fascinated by drop out of the narrative for long stretches, and coincidences pile up in ways that seem to serve the plot more than the DNA of the characters. I also found it a bit hard to keep track of some of the characters, and the shape-shifting nature of their relationships, straight. But none of that matters much in the long haul. The Mysteries of Lisbon is the movie equivalent of sinking into a good book. Scene by scene it captures, somehow, the tactile nature of the act of turning the page, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the existence of the fast-forward button.