'The Saragossa Manuscript'

I don't have a lot to say about this movie outside of the fact that it's extremely bizarre and and extremely long.

Running 182 minutes for a plot that wanders and skips to and fro is not an easy passage of time. It takes work and a certain dedication.

It entails a soldier during the Napoleonic Wars finding a book, the Saragossa Manuscript, that details the doings of his grandfather, also a soldier. While the film works as a sort of flashback to his grandfather's time, it also includes our hero interacting with a series of eccentric and odd characters from a sort of shaman to two Moorish princesses, who claim to be cousins and who also seduce him.

Or so we think. Whilst it is intimated that these people and scenes are real, the soldier regularly winds up waking up beneath some gallows.

I thought the movie would end with everyone realizing that the soldier is indeed dead, which might be the "truth" or the movie reality. And the people he encounters during the present are just ghosts or perhaps those helping the soul reach peace.