Avis des critiques

["Mysteries of Lisbon"] finds Ruiz in plangent form, offering a sumptuous and fluid work that, at its best, gives the elating impression of flipping through a book as the pages evaporate into smoke.

The overall effect of Ruiz's film may be that of rigorous, wryly observed control. But what it observes is life in the form of a deeply improbable three-volume novel, which is both lifelike and its own form of purest artifice.

Beyond shifting voices and surprise appearances by characters thought to be elsewhere, sudden changes of camera angles and movements from outside a given situation suggest alternative or complementary perspectives that frustrate passive identification with a particular character and hint at the filmmaker's own ambivalent embrace of the fabricated world he's constructed.

A summation of Ruiz's work, with its nested stories, unstable identities and swirling camera movements, and one that is endlessly pleasurable. Adapted from the 19th Century novel by Camilo Castelo Branco, it tells the circuitous story of an orphan and his parentage, one which spans lifetimes and consumes hundreds of identities. It is a a ballet where every step both reveals and conceals, Ruiz's camera unveiling truth at one edge and a lie at the other.

This surpassingly eerie saga is surely Ruiz’s very own The Tempest, in which the director as Prospero – fabulist, philosopher, dreamer – contemplates the lives of his puppet cast and finally closes the lid on his toy box of fiction.

"Mysteries of Lisbon" is intensely and captivatingly strange, a sinuous melodrama about secrecy, destiny and memory in which everyone involved appears to be in a state of hypnosis and on the edge of departing for some Magrittean alternative universe. "Mysteries" is exactly right.

It’s more a poignantly apt swansong than a perfect one. The storytelling is soap-operatic, and somehow intentionally wispy... For its use of sunlight and candlelight – often simultaneously – and lavish variations on a celadon colour palette, it’s certainly one of the loveliest films ever shot digitally, full of shots you could freeze-frame and look at for hours. Yes, even more hours.

[The film] deserves to be mentioned alongside such opulent costume epics as Kubrick’s ‘Barry Lyndon’, Visconti’s ‘The Leopard’ or Ruiz’s own ‘Time Regained’, though it’s also a must for fans of the slow-burning, dialogue-driven TV series the BBC made in the 1970s and ’80s, such as ‘Edge of Darkness’ or ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’.

Abetted by a superb cast and an intricate, if operatic, script, Ruíz displays a mastery of cinematic and storytelling technique that ensures this epic saga remains utterly engrossing.

We are told at the film's beginning that we are about to see a "diary of suffering," and it is that, but the effect, after four-and-a-quarter hours, is exhilarating.

Despite the running time (an even longer version was broadcast on Portuguese TV), the movie is never sluggish; on the contrary, it's smart, energetic filmmaking that also makes for engrossing entertainment.

For all the apparent differences between their source novels, Oliveira's Amor de Perdicao and the theatrical version of Os Mistérios de Lisboa both run for about 260 minutes (the TV miniseries version of Mistérios is about 100 minutes longer). But the former might be described as a modernist and exhaustive representation of a novel. Ruiz's masterpiece is a masterful and selective retelling of one, bridging the popular and arcane strands in his oeuvre with fluidity and assurance.