Like The Mysteries of Lisbon this film was adapted by Raoul Ruiz from a novel by Camilo Castelo Branco. However, after Ruiz's death it was directed by his widow Valeria Sarmiento. It depicts the retreat of the Anglo-Portuguese army under the Viscount- as he then was- Wellington to the Lines of Torres Vedas and the civilians forced to retreat with them as a result of the scorched earth policy imposed by Wellington. Malkovich's Wellington isn't much like the original. Malkovich is twenty years too old for the part and looks nothing like the original to begin with. He is shown almost entirely in his relations with a French exile painting his portrait, complaining about too many corpses and not enough panache in pictures of battles and wondering whether being known for inventing Beef Wellington is a compliment. About the only suggestion that Wellington was a military genius is the repeated emphasis that he had ordered the Lines to be built over a year before and had anticipated his eventual retreat to them before the start of the campaign. There are only two curious scenes which suggest other aspects than buffoonery to his character: one where he watches through a telescope an aide has given him an idiot boy stagger through the retreating mob of civilians looking for help. Does he know the human cost of his policy and escape it in absurdity? The other- his last appearance- where he gazes at a portrait of Bonaparte. Does he want to look like Bonaparte? Does he want to be Bonaparte? Is he getting into the mind of his opponent like Montgomery with Rommell? It's impossible to say.
Fortunately, Wellington himself is a small role. The main emphasis is on individuals caught up in the retreat- a Portuguese sergeant, his wounded lieutenant, the Irish widow (with a cut-glass English accent unfortunately) of one of Wellington's soldiers, a Portuguese whore, an Anglo-Portuguese girl with a taste for incest, an at-first-unidentified French soldier, the French general Masséna's transvestite mistress in a hussar's uniform, the idiot boy, an aristocrat fleeing with his library and searching for his vanished wife, an apparently unscrupulous pedlar...these are just a few of the characters involved. On the one hand, they are often so interesting that we'd like to know more about them; on the other, they never stay long enough to bore or annoy. A plot does emerge gradually with quite a few characters involved, but it is the line to connect the various events- a series of horrors and atrocities, some recounted in a grimly comic way. I've never seen any of Sarmiento's films so I can't say how this differs from the way Ruiz would have directed it- the grim humour, or its openness, is hers rather than Ruiz's, I think, and a certain lightness of touch. One astonishing thing is the effects obtained from a fairly small cast and a small budget; we are never aware that we are watching 'armies' of a few dozen people. One complaint- the Portuguese T.V. version is three 60 minute episodes; the film is 151 minutes long- only thirty minutes shorter. Given that, why not let us see the lot? It would still be shorter than The Mysteries of Lisbon.
12 out of 16 found this helpful