The Saragossa Manuscript

When a film’s fans include Luis Buñuel and Jerry Garcia, the filmmaker has to be doing something right. Wojciech Has’  The Saragossa Manuscript is a lavish fantasy epic from 1965 is a Polish production physically set in Spain, yet most of it seems to be happening in the mind of its imaginative author. The crazy, playful mindblower convinces us that psychoactive substances must have been in circulation in certain Polish social circles of the early 1800s. The tangled storyline is part Luis Borges, part Canterbury Tales, and part Playboy’s Girls of Warsaw. And it’s funny, too.

This teaser synopsis can’t possibly express the labyrinthine, playful nature of this bizarre trip into literary madness.

Spain in wartime: two soldiers read a book found in a house in the embattled town of Saragossa, which one of them thinks is about his Grandfather. In the book, Captain Alfons van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski) is trying to get to Madrid but is delayed in the Sierra Morena by what seem to be the ghost demons of two hanged men. In cyclical waking dreams, he’s seduced by a pair of Arabian princesses in a palace hidden under the decrepit Quemada Inn. Yet every morning, Alfons wakes up back out in the same stretch of countryside, under the gallows and its two corpses. Fleeing this dilemma, Alfons is captured by the Inquisition but rescued by some noblemen who invite him to a castle, where for a while it looks as if his ordeal was all a planned conspiracy. A passing gypsy tells a tale of the son of a Jewish Merchant, which becomes a Chinese box of overlapping stories … inside stories … inside stories.

Is The Saragossa Manuscript a surreal work, or just surreal-adjacent?  Luis Buñuel occasionally played with flashbacks hidden within flashbacks. The literary device is employed here to create an absurdist tale of interlocking destinies. It eventually coalesces into a humorous portrait of a culture united by its prejudicial differences. Soldiers mingle with priests who are really sheiks in disguise, and officers of  El Santo Oficio indeed appear when no-one expects them. A rake leeches off the son of Jewish merchant, but appearances are deceptive, and both he and a vagabond Gypsy prove to be honorable souls.

Four times as long as Buñuel’s  Simon of the Desert, The Saragossa Manuscript creates a Spain where the doings of ghosts and devils are as real as the beautifully recreated town squares and villas. Every nubile maiden in Poland would seem to have been recruited to play the various unholy vixens and mortal temptresses met along the way. Their coquettish games distract us from the broader narrative tricks the author is pulling on Alfons – and us.

Most of the relationships have aspects of a con in action; to watch the show is to constantly try to figure out what the heck is going on. Will the weird happenings be revealed as a conspiracy, or perhaps the trick of the mind?  If Alfons is already a soul in hell, Satan has a really fine sense of humor. Doors are constantly opening before us, as if we’re sharing Alfons’ dream. Potential clues to the mystery are offered: the sheik’s lost shoe, the weird skeleton-littered landscape, and the drinks that Alfons is repeatedly offered (in various locations) from the same skull-shaped goblet. With the Inquisition liable to pop up unannounced at any moment, we wonder if our hero will be revealed as dreaming the whole plot from the torture chamber of Terry Gilliam’s  Brazil.

Fans that like narrative mazes will want pencil and paper handy to take notes: the time-level intricacies of the Back to the Future movies are simple compared to author Jan Potocki’s twisted pretzel of a plot. No sooner does one story begin, than a character in it begins telling another story. When unrelated tangents begin to overlap, confusion is inevitable. It difficult to understand how storyteller #2 could know the particulars of the tale told by storyteller #4, and impossible to keep them straight anyway. The good news is that the stories don’t lead into conceptual cul-de-sacs, but pay off in the kind of ribald good humor that one would expect from a classic farce.

Zbigniew Cybulski’s Alfons is a handsome but slightly buffoonish hero, very unlike the ultra-cool rebel the star played for Andrej Wajda in  Ashes and Diamonds All the other roles are fun, especially Zdzislaw Maklakiewicz as the manipulative rake who, happily does not turn out to be a demon like so many of the other characters. A number of attractive and alluringly clad actresses decorate the screen in this old-fashioned, male-oriented adventure.

Director Has’ camera moves constantly and well; he keeps the screen alive and energized. Stylistic flourishes at the end involve a mirror to a doppelgänger world that might indicate time travel as well as a literal ‘literary distance.’  These conceptual challenges are pitched at a tone consistent with the rest of the film — an adventure with constant surprises. Watching the movie means enduring three hours of Spaniards speaking Polish subtitled in English. The epic is broken down into two parts, which helps. But it’s not the easiest film to watch or, especially with this crazy continuity, to follow. You’ll be wishing that you had been making notes, or leaving a trail of bread crumbs, maybe.

The music uses several classical cues and several instances of Spanish guitar source music. A few ‘Forbidden Planet’– like electronic warblings find their way in but seem appropriate to the weird fantasy-scape.