Saragossa, Aragon, during the Napoleonic Wars. Despite being at two opposite sides, two army officers stop fighting in order to read a book they found at a tavern. Its author is the the grandfather of one of the officers, Alfonso: in the manuscript, Alfonso is travelling to Madrid, but loses his servants and thus decides to stay overnight at an abandoned tavern that is allegedly haunted. In it, he finds two attractive women in the basement, Emina and Zibelda, who claim they will be his lovers, but only if Alfonso converts to Islam. Alfonso drinks a potion and wakes up outside near corpses. He meets a Christian Hermit to warns him to confess his sins, and his servant, Pasheko. Pasheko tells a story where he was seduced by two ghost women in a tavern at night, similarly as Alfonso. Fleeing from Inquisition, Alfonso rests at a castle, where gypsy Avadoro recounts a tale in which he was given an assignment to spy on a wife suspected of infidelity, but actually contacted her lover, Toledo, and of Roque, who helped reconcile two feuding families, Soarez and Moro, by engaging their kids in love, Lopez and Inez. Alfonso meets Emina and Zibelda again in the tavern, and finds out that the Hermit is actually their Sheik, who arranged for all the people to test Alfonso's character. Alfonso wakes up again in the countryside, writes something in the book and leaves it in the tavern.
"The Saragossa Maunscript" achieved an almost mythical reputation among the cineasts—among others, M. Scorsese oversaw the restoration of its original print while it was even included in the book "1001 Movies You Must See" by Steven Schneider—but in reality, it is an overrated film with meandering narrative that seems more like ten different short films glued together than one cohesive whole. In Nolan's film "Inception", the narrative is assembled like a neverending dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream, fracturing deeper and deeper, and the same can be said of "Saragossa": its constant inclusion of flashback stories, and even flashbacks within these flashbacks, make the movie more complex—but not better. The main story about Alfonso (legendary Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski) wondering around the countryside and constantly meeting two girls who may or may not be ghosts is never as engaging as it should be. Ironically, the gigantic "de-tour" subplot that unravels in the second half of the film, and takes up almost an entire hour (!) of the "Saragossa's" 180 minutes of running time, should have been the "main meal" of the film, whereas the main story revolving around Alfonso could have been easily scrapped altogether.
This huge subplot leads to four different stories, but connects in a satisfying manner, leading to an ending with a point (unlike the underwhelming Alfonso story), and almost acts as a movie on its own, with several romantic, inspired and elegant moments: in one great little sequence, Frasquetta is sitting near the window, watching the street through the bars, until a suitor appears and asks if she dropped anything on the ground, insisting that he would cherish anything she lost as his "favorite memory", so she tears a cross hanging from her neck and throws it down—and as the suitor kneels to pick it up, he instead stands up with a bouquet of flowers in his hand, giving it to Frasquetta. She takes off the ring holding the flowers together, and puts the ring on her finger, kissing it, in a genius visual moment that says everything. It is also amusing how some of these subplot stories complete each other: for instance, during a stormy night, Toledo hears a voice claiming to be "stuck in purgatory", and later on sees the corpse of his friend, who died in a duel, and thus assumes it was the ghost of the latter. Toledo thus gives up his life and decides to live in repentance, but in the next story, this just turns out to be a misunderstanding: Lopez, a guy in love, wanted to see his beloved Inez, so he climbed up the stairs, yet Toledo just then opened his window, and Lopez fell, got stuck in a barrel, and thus said he is "stuck in a purgatory". Sadly, the remaining two hours lack the wit, energy or power to engage the viewers, since it takes way too long for the director Has to set up the story—except that the long patience of the viewers is not rewarded.
Grade:++
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