A wealthy visitor to a small town befriends a midget and gets involved with two women as his behaviour becoming ever stranger.Firstly the print I saw was out of focus.Not sure why but it was blurry.It's a very slow film with over dubbing, which I hate.It has a surreal flavor to it, but it reminds me of a Tale of Two Cities.I was very bored. Very bored.Be prepared for one of the slowest movies you will likely ever see.

You want a real mystery? Another reviewer on this board states he's watched this film more than ten times! No disrespect intended, but that is simply well beyond my scope to fathom. I guess if you're a Rutger Hauer fan you might find it interesting to see him in a vehicle where he's not an action hero or sinister villain, but to me he looked like a duck out of water. I'm glad he stood up for the midget though, he should have cracked a few more heads while he was at it. But that bizarre scene near the end with the naked maid seemed more creepy than anything else. Maybe I just didn't have the patience for this. A couple of other writers on this board seem to have a more profound understanding of the picture than I do, and they make their case well enough. For me, this was just a mystery.

Although this is a good adaptation of Hamsun's most well know novel,a more realistic,if somewhat depressing, film called "Hunger" that was made in Norway in 1966 captures the feel of his work even better. This film by Henning Carlson is difficult to find but worth seeing out. It depicts Hamsun's struggle as an aspiring artist to survive in Christianna,now Oslo, where he faces starvation. Per Oscarsson and Gunnel Lindblom(from Ingmar Bergman's films) are the lead actors and do a terrific job of portraying the lead characters. I don't know if it is available in VHS or DVD but "Mysteries" did come out in VHS format although,as yet, I have not seen it on DVD.

This is one of several early Hauer flicks which wound up on video in the mid eighties (1984, here) stateside. This one is near impossible to locate and it is not worth the effort. The bassy almost incomprehensible dubbing accounts for much of this. But the plot is murky too. Hauer seems to be moping over a lost lover. If this film was meant to exploiut Hauer's fame, it failed miserably. Whatever the film makers intent, it doesn't translate well stateside (regrettably). A lot of sex and flashbacks afoot.