The Saragossa Manuscript (1965).
Directed by Wojciech Has, the film is an adaptation of at least part of a legendary, massive novel by Count Jan Potocki (1761-1815). The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1813) was his crowning work, favorably compared to The Decameron and The Arabian Nights for its rich folkloric elements, supernatural motifs, humor, and surreal touches. Like its predecessors it has a very modern, labyrinthine, story-within-a-story structure, but it’s even more multilayered.
The film version is a mostly faithful adaptation of this literary cat’s cradle. Zbigniew Cybulski stars as Alphonse van Worden, a young Belgian captain of the Walloon guards traveling through the arid landscapes of 17th-century Spain on his way to Madrid.
In an abandoned house he becomes entranced by an old book (the "Saragossa manuscript") that chronicles the life of one of his famous ancestors. He becomes so spellbound that he fails to notice the group of enemy soldiers that have come to arrest him. In the first of many twists, they too succumb to the book’s spell, and the action moves into a series of dreamlike adventures starring Alphonse and a gallery of memorable characters.
In the first of these adventures, he meets two princesses — actually ghosts — who alternately terrorise and seduce him, finally proposing a series of tests he must pass. On the verge of succumbing to their charms, he suddenly awakens next to a gallows on which two corpses are hung. This kind of collision of the horrific with the sensual permeates the film.
This scene only occupies the first ten or fifteen minutes of the film, but it sets the tone for what follows. From there, the story escalates into a series of increasingly complex enchantments. Alphonse is captured by the Inquisition in a fetish-drenched sequence, complete with metal masks and a rack. He fends off ghosts, fights duels, frequently wakes up to find himself in the shadow of the gallows, and best of all, listens as we do to a series of richly detailed stories of cuckolded husbands, treacherous business rivals, and deals with the devil told by those he encounters in what may or may not be a dream.
Besides the convoluted structure, characters pop in and out of each other’s stories with random logic. The ghost-princesses meander in and out of several of the other stories, moving mysteriously in the background or popping up in other guises. Sudden, startling imagery like Alphonse reaching out to touch one of these ghostly girls but finding his hand on a corpse recur throughout.
And of course no one is who he or she seems. The kindly hermit priest who takes Alphonse in and counsels him on how to avoid perdition turns out to be a shiek who claims he’s arranged all the scenarios and hired the players to enact them in the interest of Alphonse’s enlightenment. The priest’s howling, allegedly demon-possessed assistant Pasheko, whose eye is removed and eaten by ghouls in a gruesome scene, is revealed as an acrobat who was blinded in a fall.
Has deserves praise for bringing Potocki’s droll anti-clericalism to the fore. When the Inquisitors grab Alphonse, they’re amusingly blasé about their methods: "His confession," one of them says, "though slightly forced, has its advantages." Bracing, too, is the film’s charming sense of the value of camaraderie. During one of the later stories — a Byzantine affair involving rival bankers, a naïve son, a coquettish daughter, and a trickster who manipulates them all for his own amusement — one of the characters says "Good company is more precious than wealth or black magic." There’s plenty of wealth and black magic in the film, but it’s also enthralling good company.