Manoel de Oliveira

The last film of Manoel de Oliveira that I saw in a cinema was Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009), and when he made it he was 100 years old. Not that it showed in the film, which was as spruce and good as any made that year. (It opens with a scene in a train car, one long take with a stable camera, and the only thing that happens is that the conductor walks through the train asking everybody for their tickets.) After that he made two more feature films and several short films, until he finally gave up a couple of weeks ago, and died, 106 years old. He was Portuguese, born in Porto, and began making films in the late 1920s, shorts and documentaries, and his first feature was made in 1942, Aniki Bóbó. Then came a gap of 14 years until he could make another film (partly because of the dictatorship of Salazar) and he made another feature in 1963, Acto da Primevera. But it was not until after the end of the dictatorship in 1974 that he was free to completely unleash his creativity.

I have not seen all that much of his features, maybe six or so, but most of them have been powerful, and often delightful as well. I am particularly fond of I'm Going Home (2001). It is about death and art, but done with such a light touch and wry humour making the film a pure joy. At least until the last 15 minutes or so which are agonizing. The main character, Gilbert Valence, is a famous older actor, played by Michel Piccoli, who loses his wife, son and granddaughter in a car accident and is left alone with his young grandson. Yet the film consists mostly of Gilbert's daily activities, such as buying new shoes, having a cup of coffee, meeting his agent, being mugged by a punk, and observing his home town, which is Paris. It is all done with exceptional warmth, restraint and wit. Here Gilbert and his grandson bond by driving R/C cars together.

I love this film, and it is available on DVD with English subtitles.

Among de Oliveira's earlier documentaries I have seen only one, The Artist and the City (1956), about a painter in Porto. It is something of a city symphony (which were otherwise popular in the 1920s), and worth a look.

Some films seen at the Glasgow film festival

There's something to be said about a guy who, at the age of 101, continues to make films, which are not only being made, but are also good. I could only be talking about one man, the Portuguese Manoel de Oliviera. On and off I've come across his films, but never on regular release, only on festivals or cinemateques. A couple of years ago I saw Belle toujours (2006) and, admittedly, I didn't like it. But since then he's made several long and short films, and the latest of these are The Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura 2009) which I liked a lot. Friends of Oliviera will probably feel at home, although newcomers might be put off by the leisurely pace and the feeling of people rather posing than acting. It's under an hour and it's about a guy who falls in love with a blonde girl across the street from his office and what happens to that romance. It's got an interesting structure in that the guy is telling his story to a stranger he meets on a train. He's very upset and he needs to tell someone, and the woman sitting next to him is willing to listen.

It's a story which is sometimes funny, sometimes frustrating and sometimes rather moving. The subject matter might not be all that exciting, but after the film I did feel enriched by it.

The Turkish film Autumn (Sonbahar 2008) is also sometimes funny, sometimes frustrating and sometimes rather moving. Although the frustration has a different cause than in The Eccentricities... Autumn is the kind of film where characters are standing still for what seems like hours, looking at mountains and/or the ocean, whilst smoking. And sometimes they're walking on a beach or perhaps in a forest. In general it's not the kind of thing I particularly like to see in films because it can become a boring cliché, and not nearly as "meaningful" or "heartfelt" or whatever the filmmakers might think. So there was a lot of that going on. But it had also enough of good scenes about friendship and family life, and even a little bit of romance (with a prostitute of course), and in the end I kind of liked it. It told the story about a man in his 30s who's released from prison because he has a lung disease and he travels back home to his old mother. The reason he was put in prison was because he was a communist political activist, but now the old ideals seems to have died, or are dying with him.

There are a lot of films shown at the Glasgow film festival but I think those two will do for now. The festival also has a Cary Grant retrospective, but I won't write about that because I won't be able to stop.

La Captive

It's taken me the whole of the decade but now I've finally seen La captive (2000), Chantal Akerman's updated take on Marcel Proust (the fifth book of Remembrance of Things Past or À la recherche du temps perdu), shot like a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Manoel de Oliveira.

It's about a man, Simon (Stanislas Merhar) who's constantly following his girlfriend, Ariane (Sylvie Tetsud) or, when he's not following her, asks her friends what she's been up to and if they think she's going to leave him. The whole relationship is obviously deeply flawed, but at the same time there does appear to be genuine love between them.

The connection with Hitchcock is most strongly with Vertigo (1958), there are even shots of Simon following Ariane in a car which is almost exactly like scenes from Vertigo where Scottie (James Stewart) follows Madeleine (Kim Novak), the difference is that it's now in Paris instead of San Francisco.

It's a slow and slightly offbeat film, and almost as good as Chantal's early film Je tu il elle (1976), one of the truly great films. La captive has a haunting quality, which sucks you in to its own world, and creates an eerie feeling, which gets stronger and stronger as the films progresses. It's very well done.

It's a pity though that I've not yet read all of Remembrance of Things Past, as I would've liked to compare the original and the interpretation. But that's the kind of thing that can wait.