Pedro da Silva serves as Lisbon’s first and over-riding meta-narrator, who will be frequently interrupted by the flashbacks and voiceovers of others, whose tales will span the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He does not even have a proper surname when he starts his story as an orphan in the boarding school administered by the kindly Father Dinis. Known only as João, he is frankly lucky to be alive. The illegitimate product of the Countess of Santa Barbara and her impoverished true love, fate spared him the premature death ordered by her vengeful husband, the Count. Eventually, da Silva furtively meets his abused mother through the assistance of Father Dinis, who duly explains his parents’ doomed romance.
It is quite a story, but Lisbon is only just getting started. Everyone has crisscrossing back-stories that we learn in spectacular detail, including the Count, Father Dinis, and even the killer sent to dispatch the infant da Silva. In fact, he reappears after a profitable Brazilian hiatus as a swashbuckling self-made man who will play a strange role throughout young da Silva’s life. Still, this only scratches the surface of the subplots layered atop subplots in Ruiz’s classically tragic and unexpectedly redemptive opus.
Ostensibly da Silva’s story, Lisbon is often hijacked by Ruiz’s large cast of characters, perhaps most profoundly by Adriano Luz as Father Dinis (and his two or three prior personas). It is a wonderfully humane and quietly assured performance that really gives the film its soul. In an effective contrast, Ricardo Peirera is an appropriately dynamic presence as the raffish Alberto de Magalhães, as he is now known. Amongst Lisbon’s several luckless heroines, the striking Maria João Bastos unquestionably commands the screen the most vividly, personifying dignified grace as da Silva’s mother. However, the largely passive da Silva, both in the adult and child incarnations, comes across rather blandly.
