Zaragoza Manuscript Review – The Famous Polish Costume Comedy Is Surprising | film

THis 1965 epic comedy is a thrilling costume adventure in 18th-century Spain directed by Polish director Wojciech Has. It is a surreal film whose surrealism lies not only in the dry, eerie landscape of the Sierra Morena mountain range with its bleached skulls, hanging bandits, crows and mysterious inns where tempting encounters can take place, but also simply in the bewildering juxtaposition of individual tales and tales, stories that emerge from one another. The surreal (and comedic) effect is in moving from one partial story to the next, and realizing that the whole story has been thwarted and undermined.

The premise is that in the Spanish city of Zaragoza during the Napoleonic Wars, an officer attempts to arrest another officer, who appears to be reading an old book – but then gets distracted by the fact that this book is about his grandfather, the nobleman Alphonse van Warden. (We later discovered that the passages relating to this ancestor were added by hand in pen and ink, hence the Zaragoza Codex.) Then we return to this same elegant, aristocratic soldier, played by the prominent Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski.

While traveling on horseback through the wilderness in the sweltering heat, Alphonse encounters a bleak gallows with two dead men, and enters into a dramatic interlude with two Muslim princesses who ask him to convert to Islam. Is it a dream? We get flashbacks again showing the life of Alphonse’s father, a proud, insatiable swordsman. Alphonse is later captured by the Spanish Inquisition – which he did not expect – and encounters a hermit, an occultist and mathematician, a storyteller and talker, and an elegant gypsy. Alphonse’s father will appear in a collection of his own gossipy stories.

It’s pure narrative chaos, a spectacle in which meaning and resolution always seem just around the corner or just over the horizon. The Zaragoza Manuscript is like a Cervantes or a Borges, but it’s also a lot like Alejandro Jodorowsky (those Hanged Men and Princesses are like the tarot cards that Jodorowsky loved) and Terry Gilliam. Comic encounters could be Monty Python sketches or even skits by Mr. Ernie Wise. It’s shot entirely in a crisp, clean monochrome style that makes watching it feel like immersing yourself in dozens of episodes of some countercultural TV comedy from 1960s Poland.

“I no longer know where reality ends and fantasy begins,” Alphonse complains at one point. The thing to enjoy about the Zaragoza manuscript is its lack of cynicism and self-consciousness; There’s a kind of innocence and even refinement to the drama, even when it veers outrageously off the beaten path of traditional storytelling.