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Sorry, this movie sucks

Please don't spend money on this.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

First, I'd like to start off by pointing out that visually, this is a beautiful movie. The colours, the costumes, the lights, the focus of the shots are wonderful, but that's hardly something worth of four hours and half of this film.Second, I created an account on IMDb just so I could write this review.With that said, this was possibly the most painful movie I've ever the displeasure of watching. The pace is horribly slow, with too many stopped or unnecessary moments, and the silences happen too often, making it very easy to lose focus. Overall, the movie could have easily been cut by one hour without losing any of the story or building up moments.Then the way these people spoke! I'm assuming that like most Portuguese movies, the actors were theater actors alone, but still, they had to know there was a difference between pretending to be a character and just proclaim their lines like they were just reading them out loud. Everyone spoke a lot about how they felt, but no one ever showed any emotion. 'Show, don't tell' is the basic rule of good story writing, and this certainly wasn't in anyone's mind with the character's feelings. The acting was dull, bland, and in no way did anyone seem to act naturally, especially at the beginning of the movie. The characters were flat, too many of them to the point of confusion, and none were captivating. You couldn't relate or connect to any character, and that's fundamental to the interest of the story. The story is basically a bad soap opera. The repetitive story lines -- woman has a great love, it goes wrong, becomes a nun; man has a great love, goes wrong as well, becomes a priest; it all going around who slept with who and who married and who didn't, without getting us emotionally involved with the characters. The time skips are more often than not confusing, and it wouldn't have hurt to put a date every time the year changed, at least. It takes about ten minutes for everyone to realize that on the second half, Pedro da Silva is the son, and not another Pedro. (Also, what the hell is with his change of name? It felt like they got it wrong at some point and then didn't change the earlier shots. Only 3 hours later do we know it's intentional, but an explication for the change would have done wonders).(This part contains the actual spoilers!) And then, as if it wasn't enough that I had to bear through four hours and half of this torture, the ending, "It was a dream all along!" is the most sorry excuse of an ending. It means they didn't know how to end the story, that they had flaws in the plot that needed a quick, easy and lazy fix (no one but Pedro aged, for example, the confusing time jumps, the boring stories), and this crap of an ending invalidates the whole story. Even within the universe of the movie, what I just spend four hours watching didn't happen, because everything after the first five minutes of the movie was just a dream. It's not a plot twist, it's not smart, it's just another pointer of bad story telling. (spoiler's end)So basically, it has a good picture, bad acting, bad story telling, and bad editing. I watched this movie only at the request and present of an aunt on her birthday, and I don't see how does anyone willingly go through this. This is, by miles, the worst movie I've ever watched.

A young man begins pinning a narrative while in the throes of death (which you will never fully comprehend until the end of the film), and in so doing tells the tale of his parents and all the people whose lives were affected by their swift and tragic romance. It is told in the way that such tales might be told by an old man, like a river of thought, one story leading into the next, all cohesive, yet all out of joint, puzzle pieces. Like a puzzle, it is up to you, as the viewer, to put together something of a landscape of lives. There is no deep meaning to the picture, it is beauty, people, life. Each piece is a piece of time, a moment, a lurid little story, and as you receive them all, you piece them each together according to the characters and how each one affects the other. Not every detail is accurate, because this is a story as it is told, and not as it is occurring. Some people seem much more noble, or much more insidious perhaps, than they really are. These are people through the eyes of the teller of the tale, which is than being told to you by the one who heard it. Two of the characters, Alberto and Dinnis, have multiple identities, and seem to be the angel and the devil of the story, though their first-known and most common names are ironic, as is life. In fact, the story is a searing indictment of religion, as one commits suicide by spending the rest of their lives in a convent or as a monk. The nobility is hypocritical, and to live is to cheat on each other, and honor is simply what others think of you; pure honor is naivety and the naive are viciously thrown about as pawns. As the teller of these tales begins to deteriorate, the series of stories becomes more and more disjointed. In one final scene, he is visiting his mother's grave and meets his grandfather, who has become an impoverished beggar. The two of them have a bit of conversation, but never fully realize who the other one is. They depart, and both go off to die alone, the grandfather, perversely blind to all parts of the story save his own (he's literally blind too, after actually attempting suicide the dishonorable way... you know, literally attempting suicide). This is essentially a Victorian painting come to life, and when you know all the details, you know little other than, well, life's a bitch... and only the good die young.

There are two ways to view a film. One is to accept and endorse the conventional wisdom about the film, and to endorse it because "they" must be right. The other is to judge the film on its merits. "Mysteries of Lisbon" has the following "merits": a simple-minded plot, glacier-like plot development, insipid dialog, wooden acting, murky cinematography, and half-baked attempts to inject surrealist touches (as if these could redeem the film's other failings). I went along with the gag for quite a while before ejecting disc 1 of "Mysteries of Lisbon" and finding something better to do -- which was easy, in the circumstances.

This series of short stories set in a world long gone is of course a costume drama, that may therefore deter some. They would be mistaken. It is slow, considered, colorful and in my view a good introduction to the world of our ancestors, who held opinions different from ours, did things in a different way, and got upset about the same issues, yet in a different clothing. Love that is thwarted, wise padres, noble families with poor youngest children and all of that in a heavily draped world - sometimes a bit much. And yet I may recommend that you sit down, do not hurry, leave your perhaps preconceived ideas at the entrance, and enjoy these so many hours of romantic stories.