During Napoleon's invasion of Spain a pair of officers - one French, one Spanish - discover an elaborately illustrated book in an old tavern in the town of Saragossa and are mesmerised by its pictures and the story it tells.
The book chronicles the adventures of the Spanish officer's grandfather, Captain Alfonso van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski) of the Walloon guard, as he tries to find his way through the dangerous, demon-haunted Sierra Morena.
His journey is continually interrupted by seemingly random encounters which spiral off into their own adventures.
The first half of the film - yes, there's an interlude as the whole epic is almost three hours long - primarily revolves around a haunted inn, the Venta Quemada, where the captain first meets a pair of gorgeous, seductive Muslim princesses, Emina (Iga Cembrzyńska) and Zibelda (Joanna Jędryka), who claim he is their cousin and try to get him to convert to Islam.
Further encounters include bandits who may - or may not - have already been executed, a holy man who is trying to drive a demon out of a disgraced nobleman, the Spanish Inquisition (nobody was expecting that), and an occult cabalist who leads Alfonso to the relative safety of his castle.
The second half of the film is dominated by a monumental, intertwining, tale of feuding merchants told to Alfonso at the cabalist's castle by a visiting gypsy-king (Leon Niemczyk), that eventually ties back to Alfonso himself through his duel-happy father (Slawomir Lindner).
Many of the stories told in The Saragossa Manuscript - and especially the lengthy story of the merchants - involve the characters in the stories telling stories themselves, and sometimes even the characters in their stories also tell stories, meaning the film eventually becomes a multi-layered Russian nesting doll of tales within tales within tales. And, of course, the whole thing is a tale in itself, in a book (which becomes a crucial part of the narrative in the latter stages of the film).
An earlier work than The Hourglass Sanatorium, from director Wojciech Has, The Saragossa Document (aka Rekopis Znaleziony w Saragossie) lacks the assured, smooth pacing of the later work and, at times, feels more like an exercise in clever film-making.
On the other hand, even with its multi-layered narrative and larger-than-life tale-spinning characters, the overarching story of The Saragossa Document is generally easier to follow than The Hourglass Sanatorium.
It only really steps into surrealism during the closing stages as Alfonso feels his sanity slipping away as he attempts to grasp the reality of everything that has befallen him - if anything actually has, as it it could all have been a dream... or a foreshadowing of an adventure Alfonso is about to have.
This is a film that requires attention, not only to keep track of whose story is being told at any one time, but also of events going on in the background and little clues that eventually explain what might be going on with the princesses and their involvement in Alfonso's life.
I have to confess that when Alfonso is eventually told what is going on, even though it explained some brief incidents that otherwise just came across as odd, I felt a bit cheated.
Of course, the film still has another trick up its sleeve by once more pulling the rug out from under Alfonso and us, so we are left wondering whether it really was the truth or some further demonic torment of our honourable protagonist.
The Saragossa Document is the sort of work that film students' wet dreams are made of. I'm sure there are numerous theses gathering dust in university libraries trying to peel back the multi-layered onion that is the quite unique narrative structure of this story.
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