Mysteries of Lisbon – review

This is the last completed work from the remarkable and prolific Chilean film-maker Raúl Ruiz, who died in August this year at the age of 70. Originally intended as a TV mini-series, it has now been boldly put together as a dream-epic feature in two parts, lasting four-and-a-half hours. 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.

Ruiz's screenwriter Carlos Saboga has adapted an 1854 novel, Mistérios de Lisboa, by the Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco, set around the turn of the 19th century. Branco's story is an involved tale of coincidences, hidden aristocratic parentage, extraordinary legacies, passion, honour, sexual obsession and the fighting of duels. It is a little like something by Hugo or Dickens; one of the bemused characters also compares his situation to a novel by Ann Radcliffe. Yet the idiom of Ruiz's film-making is utterly different from the brisk, conventional manner of Anglo-Hollywood costume drama. It is a style in which existence is suspended almost weightlessly in the medium of memory – I can't think of a film-maker who has found a style that approximates so interestingly the literary past tense of "he said", "she went" etc – and Mysteries of Lisbon bears comparison with Ruiz's masterly Proust adaptation from 1999, Time Regained.

The characters act out their lives in a world seamlessly woven from dreams and waking, or like figures from a toy theatre brought miraculously to life, with mannerisms that are often eccentric and bizarre but presented in a distinctive context in which the absurd and the ironic have somehow been transmuted into something else: something that expresses the unhappiness and sheer helplessness of the characters' lives, fluttering and wriggling in existential traps long ago constructed for them by their ancestors.

At the story's centre is Pedro de Silva, a young orphan in Lisbon, played as a boy by João Luís Arrais, and a young man by Afonso Pimental. This boy is taken under the wing of the orphanage's director, a priest of shrewd, enigmatic severity and reticent wisdom, wonderfully played by Adriano Luz. Father Dinis is to reveal to Pedro, little by little, the extraordinary story of his origins. The boy is to become acquainted with his mother Ângela (Maria João Bastos), the story of her unhappy marriage to the tempestuous and unfaithful Count of Santa Bárbara (Albano Jerónimo) and the disreputable brawler and merchant Alberto de Magalhães (Ricardo Pereira), who is to defend her honour. In the second half of the movie, Father Dinis himself is to reveal more of his own extraordinary career that preceded elevation to the priesthood: a master of disguise, a libertine, a soldier, a man about town, and, like Pedro, an abandoned child.

Even describing the action as "dream-like" is not quite right: it is more that Ruiz withholds the normal assurances of tone, the usual guidance as to how we should feel about everything that traffics across the screen. He and his cinematographer André Szankowski contrive startlingly unusual camera positions, and their most notable distancing technique is simply declining to give us many closeups. There are some characters who are seen in long shot almost all the time: we can't be sure exactly what they look like.

In one extraordinary moment at the very beginning of the film, Pedro is spoken to by a child who walks alongside him – the camera accompanies them both, right to left – and the boy then gestures tonelessly to a man whom he identifies as his father, who at that moment is being hanged in public, before a knot of indifferent onlookers. Should we feel astonishment? Horror? Pity? Or is this simply another piece of the unreadable, incomplete jigsaw puzzle that is poor young Pedro's life?

There are many bizarre touches. An affray in the street is glimpsed, incompletely, from behind Father Dinis's coach, the priest himself seen in profile, gazing alertly straight ahead. Ruiz has many conventional "ball" scenes in which bewigged and powdered nobles prattle and gossip and scheme: it is a staple of period drama, but odd things happen here. In one sequence, a lady gasps and faints to the floor, an event that induces a catatonic silence among everyone else. Surrounding people will laugh in eerie unison and suddenness at some raillery. In another scene, the characters, shot from the waist up, glide with absurdly obvious smoothness, as if on rollerskates, or indeed like the cutout characters in Pedro's toy theatre.

It could be that Ruiz has some kind of satirical relationship with his source material, that he has taken its preposterous intricacy and, entirely deadpan, constructed from it a meditation on the arbitrariness of fate and the unknowability of the past. Or perhaps he has just found in it the ideal basis for a gorgeous, mesmeric spectacle, and one with great human warmth. Either way, for those with open minds, the cinema of Ruiz offers enormous and unique pleasure.