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A 16th-century noblewoman awaits her husband’s return from war in a stately, highly wrought drama etched with refinement and intelligence

Rita Azevedo Gomes’s The Portuguese Woman is elegant, mysterious, implacably distant slow cinema, beautiful but opaque, composed on the stately level of the court masque, and with a delicate, if not precisely subtle, flavour of eroticism. I found myself utterly absorbed – more so because I went away and read the 1924 short story on which it’s based, by the Austrian author Robert Musil, known for his monumental and unfinished The Man Without Qualities.

In the early 16th century, an unnamed Portuguese noblewoman (played by newcomer Clara Riedenstein) has married the aristocratic Lord von Ketten (Marcello Urgheghe). When he goes to war in Italy, she stays behind with her retinue and ladies-in-waiting, waiting for his return for over a decade in a becalmed state of torpor and inscrutable discontent.

The opening of “The Domain” is a classic mid-length widescreen shot of a solitary tree silhouetted against the sky. The camera slowly pans left to reveal a second tree, with a man hanging from a branch. This too feels fairly familiar, if disturbing, and one watches imagining that director Tiago Guedes is using such archetypal images to then play with the form, or do something unusual with the subsequent nearly three-hour running time. Instead, his sprawling family epic spanning from 1946 to 1991 largely shifts from the derivative to the banal. Designed like a meaty novel in which Portugal’s political fortunes impact a privileged family of landowners,

Guedes (“Noise”) points to Westerns and some melodramas like Vincente Minnelli’s “Home From the Hill” as major influences, which demonstrably act as templates with added political overtones. Certainly the way the tug-of-war between dictatorship, revolution and capitalism batters the independent-minded Fernandes family does...