THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT Movie Review

Rekopis Znaleziony W Saragossie

This highly ambitious epic yarn is perhaps the best-known of the many rarely screened works of Polish director Wojciech Has. A movie that's become as legendary as the Jan Potocki novel on which it's based, The Saragossa Manuscript is the long and winding tale of a Belgian military officer (Zbigniew Cybulski) who encounters two beautiful princesses while on his travels during the Napoleonic era. Demanding to know if the officer is worthy of their affections, they send him on a fantastic and surrealistic series of adventures during which he is expected to prove that he is up to their challenge. The Saragossa Manuscript is three hours long, and since it's something of a shaggy-dog, Baron Munchausen-ish legend at heart, film distributors apparently felt free over the years to chop the picture down into smaller versions. Riding to the restoration rescue came—and even Criswell couldn't have predicted this one—the late Jerry Garcia, whose favorite movie this was. Though the Martin Scorsese—assisted full restoration happened too late for Jerry to see, the full-length version of The Saragossa Manuscript was screened to a sold-out house at the 1997 New York Film Festival. After two attempted viewings, I have to confess that I've never been able to get into this movie's rhythm for more than an hour or two, but that's just my stodgy temperament, I suppose. It's obviously an original, truly weird creation, and what the hell—it was good enough for Jerry. (Be sure to see it in a letterboxed version, or you'll miss the splendid widescreen compositions.)

NEXT STOP … Orpheus, The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, Kaos

1965 174m/B PL Zbigniew Cybulski, Iga Cembrzynska, Joanna Jedryka, Slawomir Linder; D: Wojciech Has; W: Tadeusz Kwiatkowski; M: Krzysztof Penderecki. VHS FCT