I watched Mysteries of Lisbon on DVD, with subtitles, so I had the luxury of going back & reviewing parts of the film to try & keep track of who characters were & what was happening. In the last scene, Joao the orphan is about 15 years old & the nun comes to his room to check on him. She calls for Padre Denis since Joao is cold & unresponsive. This seems to follow after Joao was knocked unconscious by the pelota ball. Was the bulk of the story just Joao’s dream? Had the boy actually died during his coma? This would explain some of the odd happenings, the suicide at the duel, the many odd interconnecting relationships, etc. We all have dreams were unexplained & illogical things happen. Joao was obsessed with finding out about his parents. Was he only having a dream about his parents & ancestry?
cold & unresponsive. This seems to follow after Joao was knocked unconscious by the pelota ball.
It implies he died as a result of being hit on the head.Remember most of the events in the film are recounted in flashback, we have a narrator and he's a narrator who might be a boy (fourteen, but just a boy at this point) knocked out and dreaming and narrating a wish-fulfillment dream (which makes the narrator unreliable because he's knocked out and narrating things he wished happened) or a matured teenager deathly sick and delirious and disillusioned narrating his life story (which still makes the narrator unreliable).The duel: the revelation that the man he wanted to kill was the man who spared his life was an epiphany that destroyed him, an epiphany that was like turning the gun on himself and pulling the trigger, hence in the flashback - remember the duel is a flashback - he turns the gun on himself and pulls the trigger (and doubly vanquishing his [failed] Pedro persona, bravado gone, mask gone, dreams gone, passion for life gone, Joao once more but a spiritually devoid Joao), a moment that I felt was extremely humourous when the film continued forward with a living Joao/Pedro. Narrator Joao interpolated the suicide because that is exactly how he felt at th duel, how he'd wished he killed himself, and since there was no place to hang a painting of a person writhing in agony, the Narrator Joao pulled the trigger on himself to make it clear to listeners/readers/viewers that he spiritually/emotionally died inside the moment he realized he was attempting to kill Alberto/Knife-Eater.Joao-at-fifteen succumbs to his illness and in the moment of succumbing, at the moment of death, he's mentally transported back to the moment he was knocked in the head with the ball and laid down in bed and his mother came to see him because that is the moment his life changed, that was a life-changing epiphany for him that opened his life. The classroom lesson - Dinis: What is dynamic physics? Joao: Dynamics is the branch of mechanics that studies forces and the movements they themselves produce. Dinis: And what is force? Joao: That which can alter the resting state or movement of a body, or distort it.At his moment of death he mentally leapt back to the moment he was knocked unconscious as a boy with a blank slate, the moment that changed his life, and the meaning is, in his innocence-lost fifteen year-old death throws, he was wishing he died when he was knocked unconscious by the ball, he was wishing he died that day instead of waking up, he was wishing he could go back in time and do things differently - not wake up to the world the boyhood epiphany waked him up to.The subconscious wish-fulfillment dream (obsession with parentage manifesting itself in dream, triggered by a blow to the head) explanation is as equally valid as the explanation that everything really happened (complete with seemingly improbable coincidences and grand hyperbole and theatrical flourishes because remember the narrator would be a deathly ill and disillusioned Joao at fifteen dictating an elaborate epical background comprised of generations-old memories orally transmitted to him, a death-bed confession dictation serving as the film's narration). I think there's a lot in the film that strongly supports both explanations. For example, many of the paintings are brought to life in the film. Some scenes in the movie occur within the paintings, some characters in the paintings step into the film, and the inner turmoil/agony of all the characters are vividly expressed in whatever paintings are in their scenes. And some paintings make multiple appearances in multiple locations in different time frames. The use of the paintings - characters and landscapes and situations that weave into and out of the paintings, characters who psyches are exposed for all to see in bold oil works above their heads, paintings that appear in multiple locations across time - supports the explanation that the movie was Joao's subconscious wish-fulfillment dream because only in a dream (or film or painting.....) would paintings and reality shapeshift and travel so much, and, afterall, paintings originate from within (imagination, mind, psyche), but at the same time, the shapeshifting travelling nature of the paintings supports the explanation that everything really happened because some of the paintings Joao never laid eyes upon (so how would they manifest themselves in his dream) and the use of the paintings emphasize the film's themes of how everybody's lives are interlocked and how life itself is a never-ending circle of repetition, a theme that directly implies the events really occurred.I don't think it matters whether or not he dreamed something that he wished happened or he narrated something that really happened, what matters is he dreamed a 'remembrance of things past' and the remembrance required 'dreaming' in order to remember it. Whether or not it was a fictitious dream or autobiographic narration (remember - if it was all real, 95% of it was told to him, only 5% he personally experienced, he had to reconstruct other people's memories), he had to use his imagination, he had to dream, he had to puppet his own dreamtheatre, to reconstruct memories of the past. A subject worthy of its own thread (the texture of memories of the past), haven't even scratched the surface of it, but it's the entire point of the movie.Joao/Pedro shooting himself was Joao-the-narrator-musing-on-his-deathbed, wishing he'd done just that. Joao-the-mature-teenager morphing back into Joao-the-blankslate was Joao on the verge of death mentally returning to the time when he knew nothing about anything, right before the epiphany, a time when for him the world was "perfect" and the possibilities unlimited and his dreams more real and valid to him than anything else, a time he burned to return to, and in his deaththroes did.Food for thought: the film is based on a book, the writer, Camilo Castelo Branco, committed suicide by shooting himself to death, and the film reads like an autobiography of the writer's life (orphanhood, bastardhood, poverty, imprisonment, priesthood, adultery, literary celebrity, nobility, suicide). The director perhaps included Joao/Pedro shooting himself because Camilo Castelo Branco shot himself, a fourth-wall shout-out of sorts, and Castelo Branco shot himself to death because, according to Wikipedia, he was going blind (because of syphilis) and suffering from chronic nervous disease, and as we see in the film, after the duel, Joao/Pedro's health dramatically declines in much the same manner. Perhaps both deaths were depicted because Camilo underwent both deaths (a death of bodily decay and a suicide), both deaths tying into the dual-nature/duality/two-sides-same-coin theme streaming through the film.
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Thanks for the nice reply, Temp-1; but I have to ask who you think died at the failed duel? Pedro got into the carriage and rode off with his would-be victim and the story continued. The person pulling the gun on himself was the "strange" manservant who was left out in the middle of nowwhere. Pedro/Joao never holds a gun at the duel ... it is called off before both guns are prepared.
After Alberto knocks away Joao's sword, Joao's narration relays "it was decided to continue our duel with pistols" and a servant brings a box with Alberto's pistol, giving the pistol to Alberto, but Alberto ends the duel by revealing his connection to Joao.Alberto puts on his coat and a servant hands Joao his hat and puts on Joao's coat. Alberto signals for Joao to follow him to the carriage and he does, but either walks around it to the right or climbs into it on one side then climbs out the other side (that part is obscured with bystanders/servants), he veers left and walks straight towards the woods. He stops at the edge and turns around, walking right and a bit diagonally towards the camera, flings his hat off, removes a pistol from the upper part of his coat, kneels down, and shoots himself. Even though this happens at a distance from the camera with his face and profile somewhat obscured, there's no doubt it's him when he takes off his hat: it's his long flat floppy 21st century skateboarder hair, not the curly cropped cuts of the other actors in that scene.
No, sorry ... I watched this just last night. Joao walks with Alberto to the carriage and gets in and sits opposite of him ... than the narration continues as the carriage pulls off.
I specifically went back and watched that scene after reading what you wrote ... and he clearly gets in. The back half of the carriage is obscured by those 4 men; but you see Joao get in. The ?-Guy has been seen walking back and forth in the background for quite a while ... and was left. You see him pass by the carriage's back window when it pulls out.
Joao was never handed a pistol either -- he was never given one to inspect like Alberto did first. Before the duel could have began, Joao would have been handed another pistol for him to inspect and approve of before the duel began.
I am 100% certain about this :) or 1000%. I went back and kept my eye on Joao a third time ... HE IS IN THE CARRIAGE! I swear to it ... :)
Yes, I 1000000% remember that Joao gets into the carriage, but I was actually referring to earlier in the scene. The entire sequence is done in one long take, right? And I thought that "Joao 2" may have been walking around in the background of the shot while Joao and Alberto are preparing to fight (i.e. before the duel actually begins)?
I've only seen the film once (and that was at the cinema a while ago), so I probably imagined this after "Joao 2" appeared and shot himself. Must watch again (and the full-length series)!
Our Joao does get into the carraige and rides off to continue the story and narration. Undoubtably.
I guess the second Joao is part of the "Mystery" of the film's title. He never figures into that scene at all ... doesn't even really observe any of the action as he is walking back and forth for the entire scene. He only comes out after the carriage has ridden off and the four men have also retreated elsewhere. This must simply be a characterization of how Joao felt about the aborted duel ... humilated, confused and thinking death would have been easier.
I mean ... none of those 4 men returned to his aid after the shot was fired. So it obviously just a "fictional" manifestation of his psyche.
And you are right -- it is one long take and he'd been there for the entire thing. I'd like to find the series as well.
OK, it looks as though our interpretations were wrong. Ruiz actually commented on the duel scene.
One of the extras on set didn't have anything to do. So, recalling that that part of Portugal (and especially Sintra) is a place where many people go to commit suicide, Ruiz invented a random character wanting to commit suicide on that exact spot who has to wait until this ridiculous duel has finished. Ruiz was continuing his game of displacing the narrative space's focus of attention towards a secondary element, thus creating a multiplicity of times/durations - a cinematic effect he thought impossible to capture in literature.