Mysteries of Lisbon

It’s snowing like crazy outside, and so I’m settling in for a bonus day of writing. In this spirit, we enjoyed a long, challenging film this weekend, the 4 1/2 hour period piece by Raul Ruiz, Mysteries of Lisbon.

I don’t know how I have so far missed this Chilean/French filmmaker, who made over 100 films before he died in 2011. Mysteries of Lisbon is his penultimate film and, no doubt, his masterpiece.

That said, I can only recommend it to you if you’re very interested in films, in storytelling (especially postmodern storytelling) or thinking about identity, and have a lot of patience. Personally, I smiled through most of it and was utterly delighted– it brings to mind the quirky and impeccable sets and random activity of Wes Anderson’s films, and I found the twists and turns delightful. But there is actually nothing random in these stories or this filmmaking.

Mysteries of Lisbon is based on an 1854 novel of the same name by Camilo Castelo Branco, and set in the late 18th century and early 19th century. I imagine the novel is picaresque like Moll Flanders or Tristram Shandy. But in style, it reminded me more of the Latin American stories/novels like Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps, or work by Borges and the master Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was more like Don Quixote which, when I read it to teach it to community college students, stunned me with its brilliant playing with narrative.

Mysteries of Lisbon starts out with an orphan named Joao, a boy with no last name (in a world where people have multiple last names clearly stating their heritage and lineage) and no idea of who he is or where he came from. The other boys suggest he is the son of the priest. In truth, the priest plays a large part in his story, but he is not Joao’s father.

Ostensibly, the film is about Joao, who becomes Pedro da Silva. He is reunited with his mother only briefly, long enough to hear her story. Over the course of the film we hear many people’s stories. You could even argue that the priest is actually the person this film is about (although in the end there are a few things left completely blank about his story– like what is the true relationship between him and his “sister,” the nun Dona Antonia). As for Pedro, he goes along, interacting with the various players in his life, even finding a benefactor at one point, moving to Paris, falling in love, challenging someone to a duel. But at the end of his life he is on a bed in Brazil with a collection of objects on a table: a portrait drawn by a noblewoman practicing her drawing in the park, a woman who, once she has drawn the picture, we never hear from again; a puppet theater his mother gave him, on which we’ve watched various stories play out in miniature; and a wooden ball. He lies down, feverish and lost, and begins to tell himself his story again. After all the stories, we are where we started, and so is Pedro, with no idea of who he is.

It will probably be evident to all why I loved this movie. I am a firm believer that telling one’s story is a way to cement one’s identity. It is necessary, I believe, to understand your own narrative.

If you were to look at my life, in fact, it was only after writing a full-length memoir of my life, making sense once and for all of the trajectory of my life and the things that had happened, that I “settled down.” To me it feels like coincidence, because I had reasons for all my moves– to Atlanta, to New York, To Northern California, to Chicago, to Joliet, to Reno, to Southern California– before coming to Minnesota. But if one wants to tell the story another way, I finished writing my own story only in the year I came to Minnesota, and once written, I was free to settle down. Things have turned out pretty well.

I don’t even speak about the “large events” of my childhood, which I obsessively shared for years during my formation as an adult and as a writer. It was through telling the story that I was able to confidently move forward as myself (for me a written event, but for many just an oral history, or just understood without the need to construct it, because the events and their meaning are unchallenged). I truly believe it made me whole.

And so, poor Joao! He is at the margins of his own life! His story belongs in the end to the priest, his mother, a pirate, a couple of counts, a noble French woman looking for revenge– everyone but himself! And though he seems to be trying to start anew, he is more than anything lying in the bed trying to arrive where he is, trying to tell himself the story of his own life so he can move forward at all.

For me, Mysteries of Lisbon gave me a broad space to think about these issues again. It reminded me of the thrill I felt when I first read Latin American literature, back when I was assigned to teach “Nonwestern Literature in Translation” at Joliet Junior College in 1998. I had no idea the riches that were there to be uncovered. The chief subject seemed to be how language made the world. The stories told created as much as reflected reality. And if you had no language for something, it did not exist. In this way reality is suppressed every day.

I wonder still, at my own journey. I am so full right now, with fiction and the stories I want to tell. This second novel is going wonderfully, with discoveries and the characters just chattering away with each other. There are whole worlds there. Perhaps in knowing one’s own story, one is also set free to tell others. In any event, it is something to think about. And thank goodness for winter, when these thoughts can be thought.

snow on the balcony