Every once in awhile during my project of chronologically viewing and reviewing each film in the 1001 movie list, I will come across a movie that I have not only never seen before, but never even heard of. “The Saragossa Manuscript”, directed by Wojciech Has, is one such film. What makes it doubly difficult in reviewing this movie, is its incredibly complex plot that includes layers upon layers of interconnected flashback story lines. I believe that multiple viewings are required to truly appreciate this movie. Unfortunately, I have only seen it once with this being my first impression of the initial viewing. “The Saragossa Manuscript”, is a three-hour historical epic made during the Iron curtain period of Poland, and all the dialogue is in Polish. Yet it deals with Spanish soldiers, set mostly during the middle ages of Spain, which is just the first flashback, as the story begins during the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th century. This opening has two opposing soldiers, during a battle in the Spanish town of Saragossa, who in the middle of said battle come across a manuscript that features on its first page, a picture of two hanging men in a gallows, and two women in a bed. Hypnotized by the book, they shut out the war by closing the door in the Inn where the manuscript was discovered. The manuscript tells the story of the ancestor of one of the soldiers, Alfonso Van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski) who is trying to reach Madrid during the middle ages and is warned by his servants from seeking the shortest route through the Sierra Morena Mountains, due to the belief that the area through this pass is haunted. He ignores this warning and ends up at a gallows site, where two thieves are hanging (like the picture in the manuscript), and enters a seemingly deserted Inn that is actually inhabited by a harem run by two beautiful Moorish princesses, who seduce him and state that he is the first man they every saw. They may also be witches as throughout the movie he keeps getting drawn back to them. From his first night with the sexy royalty, our hero ends up in the gallows again. Throughout the movie he will return to the princesses and then back to the gallows more than once, hence the pictures of both the gallows and the sensual women found on the first page of the actual manuscript from which this story is being told. He will also meet a catholic priest with a possessed disciple, a Jewish Kabbalist, a Sultan (father of the princesses), an intellectual Romani person and a Gypsy leader. Each time he meets one of them, they tell a story that reverts into a flashback. Sometimes within the flashback there is another story being told that in turn also reverts into a flashback. In a few of these instances the flashback within a flashback touches on one of the previous stories and I think multiple viewings may result in discovering that all the interlaced flashback stories interact with each other. With one viewing however it was very hard to track everything. Some of the stories follow Van Worden’s childhood, showing his father’s penchant for sword duels. There are quite a lot of sword duels in the movie and some very polite deaths as the duels were a tool of respect rather than anger. There is also a sensuous sexy mood throughout the movie, as almost all the female protagonists starting with the Princesses are alluring and sexy. The black and white cinematography is quite lovely in its depiction of the hot Spanish landscape and the cobbled streets of Madrid. Some of the actors are superb, as in Zbigniew Cybulski, who was a Polish heartthrob and an extremely underrated actor. Some of the other performances, such as those of the Princesses, suffer from too much over-acting. What fascinated me about the movie was its layered flashback within a flashback style that gives the it a heightened surrealistic feel. It is almost akin to delving deeper and deeper into the minds of the characters. At a little over three hours long, this plot mechanism can be daunting at times. The best way to describe the movie’s plot is by calling it circular as each thread leads to the beginning of another until the mystic end that leads back to the beginning of the movie. This is a mysterious fable-like film and is the type of movie people like to discuss over a beer in a dark pub, as they try to figure out how everything correlates. The ending asked me, the viewer, to rewind the movie and watch it again. One day I will do just that, but after three hours, I was, while impressed, also very confused, and not curious enough to spend another three hours that is required to fully understand it.
1001 Movies before you die 