I’m Going Home
It seems entirely fitting that I’m Going Home–a beautiful feature by Manoel de Oliveira, who turns 94 this December and is still going strong–should open in Chicago, at the Music Box, just after September 11. This 2001 French film by a Portuguese master who occasionally makes films in France is the kind of quiet masterpiece that fully registers only after you’ve seen it–a profound meditation on bereavement and other kinds of loss (including losing one’s way) as well as on everyday life and things right under our noses that we accept as “other,” including old age and art and different cultures.
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Five years ago French critic Raymond Bellour wrote a letter that was part of a collection of exchanges about cinephilia published in Trafic under the title “Movie Mutations.” It’s worth quoting at length: “Curiously, the word ‘civilization’ springs to mind. A word far greater than ‘cinema,’ its life or death, but which is itself also interior. There is a name that goes with this word: Oliveira….Oliveira’s preoccupation is, to put it banally, the fate of the world, how to live and die, survive in harmony with the logic of an ancient and prestigious country, which was fortunate to discover the world when it was worth discovering, and the strange destiny of having in part escaped the worst conflicts of this century thanks to a cruel and miserable dictatorship. He is, I believe, the only filmmaker who knew how to tell, in a unique film, the history of his country, from its founding through a melancholy myth up to the end of its empire (No, or the Vainglory of Command [1990])….Thanks not only to the extreme beauty of the images and a stunning vision of the capacities of the shot and of editing, Oliveira shows in all his films a profound sense of culture and art, of their place in everyday life as well as in collective memory. In short, he’s a great, immense artist, and above all a profoundly civilized man, one who is hyper-conscious, terrified that his civilization is ending, that his country is succumbing to Europe, that Europe is the shortest route to America (recall the old peasant woman’s monologue in Voyage to the Beginning of the End of the World [1997]).”
I’m not sure “terrified” is the best word for an artist for whom meditative stillness and calm observation are so central. But this is still a remarkably perceptive description–of a body of work that began with a silent documentary in 1931 and of the half dozen features de Oliveira has released since Bellour’s words were published. (I’m guessing it still applies to his most recent film, The Uncertainty Principle, which I’m looking forward to catching up with next month at the Chicago International Film Festival.) It might be argued that de Oliveira’s track record was uneven during the 80s and early 90s, with films as good as No often followed by ones as dull as The Divine Comedy (1991). But ever since the 1997 Voyage he’s clearly been on a roll. Inquietude (1998), The Letter (1999), Word and Utopia (2000), Oporto of My Childhood (2001), and now I’m Going Home form the most impressive string of masterworks I can recall seeing from anyone in years. Each one is different, and Inquietude and I’m Going Home are especially impressive.
Watching the final scene of the absurdist Exit the King, the unwary viewer may be confused by the infantile regression of a king who’s about to die but also may be distracted because most of the time Valence has his back to both the theater audience and the camera (though Piccoli can act with his back almost as well as Erich von Stroheim could act with the back of his neck). This is characteristic of de Oliveira’s approach to action in many scenes, an approach that deserves to be called essentialist rather than minimalist. For the essential part of the action here isn’t what’s occurring onstage; rather it’s the arrival of three men, who go first to the auditorium upstairs, then appear backstage. They carry the horrible news about the deaths in Valence’s family, conveying this information to him off camera in his dressing room after the curtain calls. At the same time, the other actors (and we) learn the news backstage and remark that the only family Valence now has left is his young grandson, Serge.
In terms Hollywood producers would understand, de Oliveira cuts to the chase–though the chase in this case is the world we live in and the life we value, including the small things. This no-nonsense approach yields a glorious film full of revelations–all of them light and many of them playful, but not one of them despairing, for all the grief they depict. At a time when war drums are thudding, these quiet thoughts are music to the ears.
