In Mysteries of Lisbon, the prolific Chilean-born director and egghead Raúl Ruiz has achieved something remarkable, at once avant-garde and middlebrow: the apotheosis of the soap opera. Point of view is passed like a baton. There are multiple narrators, flashbacks within flashbacks, crisscrossing story lines, incredible coincidences, and characters who shed one identity and pick up another. You can study it, like a painting, and then realize, with a gasp, that it has got hold of you like a fever.
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