Lines of Wellington (2012) New York Film Festival 2012

Made in order to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the events depicted (The Battle of Bussaco), the film was started by director Raul Ruiz before he died. It was then finished by his wife, Valeria Sarmiento. It's a huge sprawling epic of a population in flight.

The film is the story of the events in the closing days of Napoleon's invasion of Portugal. After winning a battle, Wellington's army is forced to retreat in the face of superior numbers (and as part of a trap to lure their pursuers into a trap). The population flees as well fearful of what the French will do.  The film tells the story of many of the people who are in flight from the French, as well as a few French soldiers as well. We follow several soldiers (one with two bullets in his head), a painter, a young woman traveling with her brother and sick father, a crazed priest, a whore, a widow, a nun, people building fortifications, Wellington. and many others. We get incidents of lust, violence, faith, incest, rape, infidelity, heroism,... you name it it's in here.

I described the film as sprawling and that's probably the best description since the film is so huge that it meanders through its 151 minutes like a drunken elephant. There is simply way too much going on and too many characters. It's almost as if Ruiz was trying to duplicate the complexity of his earlier Mysteries of Lisbon but in half the time.

I was over whelmed. This film just keeps going with several major stars (John Malkovich , Isabella Huppert, Michel Picoli, Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Amalric,) appearing in cameos. Why are they there? I have no idea since you could remove some of their sequences without it affecting the film.

The film also seems to have endless shots of people traveling. Just long lines of no name characters fleeing...and? I know the point of the film is to tell the story of the people in flight. The point of the film is to show what the people soldiers and civilians experience and not the history so much. Tthose looking for anything approaching a battle after the first ten minutes will be severely disappointed since the end of the conflict is best described as a major let down non-event... history or no it really deflating.

How is the film over all?

Its okay. Its a long 151 minutes. At times the film feels epic and at other times (when it should be epic) it feels rather small. We may get hundreds of people fleeing, but the size of the armies, on both sides, always seems tiny as if they only had so many uniforms.

If you like personal epics or the films of Raul Ruiz give the film a shot. If you don't then you may want to wait for the film to show up streaming. Seeing this on a big screen TV will be fine (the film was shot in conjunction with a TV station).

(A bizarre final word- In a weird way you have to admire any film that can have a tiny, almost throw away, sequence that gets group of  7 or 8 journalists talking animatedly about necrophilia in war films. I did not participate, I was scribbling notes and eating my lunch, but I had to turn to see what was going on when voices got slight raised when someone was wondering why we don't see more necrophilia in war films.)

The film plays October 8 and 9 at the film festival.