Contemplating contemplation

Above: Michel Piccoli in Je rentre à la maison.

Twelve years older than Eric Rohmer, twenty years older than Agnès Varda and Jacques Rivette, Manoel de Oliveira first astonishes us with his longevity. Born in 1908 in Oporto, Portugal, he once dabbled in acting (Fátima Milagrosa, directed by Rino Lupo, 1928) and documentary filmmaking (Douro, Faina Fluvial/Labor on the River Douro, 1931), but spent most of the next thirty years away from the cinema involved with the family business. It wasn’t until Acto de Primavera/Passion of Jesus (1963) when he resumed full time and began attracting attention on the festival circuit. And twenty years after that he entered something of a golden age, a stream of excellence that shows no signs of remission: Belle toujours, with Michel Piccoli and Bulle Ogier, was released in 2006, its director ninety-eight-years-old.

    For this week’s Contemplative Cinema Blogathon, I thought of de Oliveira and his 2001 film, Je rentre à la maison/I’m Going Home. It’s concerned with the issues closest to him: age, time and mortality — themes which were used to great advantage in Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo/Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997), where he found an eager accomplice in Marcello Mastroianni. (An inspired union, it’s unfortunate they made only one picture together.) That film also continued de Oliveira’s predilection for actors playing actors, and stage drama reflecting real life situations, themes he first used in O Passado e o Presente/The Past and the Present (1972).

    Opening on a stage performance of Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King, Je rentre à la maison gradually reveals the main character, an actor played by Michel Piccoli. In this introduction, de Oliveira films most of Piccoli from behind, with his back to the camera — a technique both jarring (depriving us of seeing the star) and informative (recognized and respected, the star owes us nothing). It also distances us from Piccoli’s character, a man emotionally estranged from most of the people in his life.

    At his advanced age and with the losses he’s endured, the character’s aloof manner — he calls it his “solitudiné” — earns our respect. In a restaurant with his agent (Antoine Chappey), their superficial banter is exchanged over an impassive, prolonged shot of Piccoli’s shiny new shoes. Chatting with fans on the street or with the waiter at this favorite cafe, voices are blocked by the windows we’re peering into. And as the seventy-six-year-old actor weathers the jumble of cuts and multiple takes of an English-language film production, playing Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, we sense his disenchantment through the strain on the face of his director (played by John Malkovich).

    In this last scene especially, Je rentre à la maison studies the progressive nature of humiliation, while other areas of the film underline the rewards of living in the moment. At peace in banality, joyous when playing videogames with his great-grandson or treating himself to simple pleasures, the actor becomes his own man, much to the chagrin of those who believe he’d be happier doing something else. But he no longer chooses to perform that role in life, opting instead for a plain, unhurried existence.

Above: Michel Piccoli and Manoel de Oliveira.

    There is no finer actor for this than Michel Piccoli. From a long and varied career, working with everyone from Renoir to Buñuel to Hitchcock, he has given a number of outstanding performances, recently as the blocked artist challenged by La Belle noiseuse (Rivette, 1991); as the father of film itself in Varda’s charming Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma (1995) — a DVD that belongs in every fan’s collection; and in de Oliveira’s Party (1996), where he got along fabulously with Irene Papas. On the Je rentre à la maison DVD commentary, Richard Peña, Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, makes an interesting connection between Piccoli’s character in the de Oliveira film with the screenwriter he played in Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Mepris/Contempt (1963): Godard had him pursuing The Odyssey, de Oliveira places him at journey’s end.

    Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve (appearing in the Exit the King segment), have lent their support to several of de Oliveira’s films, notably O Convento (1995), a dark meditation of evil and a cool satire of the horror film. Leonor Silveira, so effective as the Bovary character in Vale Abraão/Abraham’s Valley (1993) and as the mother in Um Filme Falado/A Talking Picture (2003), is the director’s most frequently used player and shows up briefly in Je rentre à la maison as an actress.

    An effective visual gimmick in Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo is the observation of life passing by through a camera mounted on the back of a moving car. As the present becomes their past, the characters regress into primitivism, questing for “home.” In Je rentre à la maison, Michel Piccoli’s actor has found home, wisely choosing rest over performance, a primitive in a world rushing to nowhere.

Manoel de Oliveira on DVD: