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93 in the shade
Manoel de Oliveira is not going home yet
BY GERALD PEARY

There’s no cinema-producing country in the world with less of a popular tradition than Portugal, where year after year the feature films released are personal and private, experimental and esoteric, and paid for, mostly, with government subsidies. Nobody has made out better than Manoel de Oliveira, who since the silent period (that’s when he began directing!) has forged his kind of Portuguese movie, without the slightest concession to what regular audiences want.

Je rentre à la maison/I’m Going Home, shot in 2000 when Oliveira was a robust 91 (he’s maybe 93 now), is typical fare, beginning as it does without any set-up or explanation, deep in a stage production of Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King, a 13-minute sequence in which Catherine Deneuve appears, and that’s it for her role! But then the movie becomes normal (mostly), moving, and wise. It’s one of the most accessible, and endearing, films in Oliveira’s 70-plus years of directing, and you’ll have all week to catch it at the Brattle Theatre, where it opens this Friday.

Actually, even the Ionesco sequence, though brazenly indulgent, resonates throughout the movie. Ionesco’s doddering ruler admits he knows nothing of life, then announces that he wants all his subjects to have the royal image before them. O vanity! Soon, the morally blind stage character and the actor playing him, Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli), separate. As the play-within-a-movie ends, Gilbert walks off stage to be met by three men in street clothes with the worst news: the actor’s wife, daughter, and son-in-law have been killed in an auto crash. Now, just like the creaky king he inhabited on stage, he’s faced late in life with the question of how to live.

But unlike the self-aggrandizing potentate, Gilbert chooses solitude. Saying no to the possibility of romance with a young actress, he lives in an old house, in a bedroom up the stairs; his only companion is his little grandson (Jean Koeltgen), whose parents were killed in the accident. Je rentre à la maison teaches the opposite value from that espoused by Ionesco’s ruler: pure humility. What counts in Gilbert’s lived life are the minuscule things: a new pair of shoes, a cup of espresso at his neighborhood bistro, the music of a calliope, the form of a revolving ferris wheel, the Eiffel Tower lit at night — all captured beautifully, tenderly, by Sabine Lancelin, Oliveira’s cinematographer. What also counts is making art, the real kind, the right kind.

Oliveira, who has never compromised his own vision, wants the same for Gilbert, whom we see on stage again playing Prospero in an avant-garde production of The Tempest. But he says no when his eager-beaver agent tries to talk him into a lucrative action-TV serial. Gilbert does makes one mistake, allowing himself to be cast in a movie version of Joyce’s Ulysses after being wooed by an American director (John Malkovich). The English language of this adaptation is not easy for him, and it’s obvious that he’s miscast, under a silly wig, as stately young Buck Mulligan. That’s where the title kicks in, an epiphanic decision: "Je rentre à la maison."

It’s a moment close to the heart of Michel Piccoli, the amazing French actor who’s so simple, so sublime, as Gilbert. "I think as the world becomes more complex, the more you have to learn to say no," Piccoli explained last year at Cannes, where Je rentre à la maison was perhaps the best-loved film in competition among the gathered critics. "Valence is a character I found extremely interesting. Am I playing myself in the part? I can’t say."

"I chose a child I saw for the very first time as his grandson," Oliveira piped in. "I chose Piccoli because he’s an actor with a lifetime of experience. I’m more and more excited about a long life of experience. Still, he’s a youngster next to me." At that, Oliveira, who honestly looks about 65, laughed uproariously. Piccoli, who was born in 1925, agreed. "I can’t do the math, but I could perhaps be M. de Oliveira’s son."

What’s so special for Piccoli about acting for Oliveira? "There’s a great deal of intimacy and closeness. He is a man who has a kind of diabolical authority and a perverse authority. At the same time he’s an enormous joker. How is it that Deneuve and Malkovich accept a part on two days’ notice? Because they have a loyalty to this mysterious man." A journalist had to ask the obvious: how these spry ancient gentlemen, actor and director, have managed to hold aging at bay. Piccoli: "I don’t want to get old. One has to become more and more radical." Oliveira: "You must ask the Lord in Heaven."

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

Issue Date: September 5 - 12, 2002
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