valadas
Manuel de Oliveira is the film director of the details. The camera is always very slow with him and much concentrated on visual details, immobile images and dialogues. Each one of these however, has its meaning sometimes poetic and contributes to introduce the spectator deeply into the atmosphere of the story. Remember for instance the scene when the old actor, after having bought and put on a pair of new yellow shoes that he liked very much, is talking to someone else at a café and while the dialogue goes on we almost never see his face since the camera focuses his feet all the time and the movements he makes with his shoes like an element of his personality. This is the story of an old actor at the end of his career still trying to work after the violent death of his wife, daughter and son-in-law in a road accident that left him in charge of his little grandson. Michel Piccoli does a great job in the role of the aging actor and we can feel all along the movie the feelings that take place in his mind on the one hand in his difficult relationship with his agent about what the latter tries to demand from him and on the other hand in his tender relationship with his grandson at home though they don't see much of each other due to to their divergent hours. A movie really worth to be seen.
DaTramp
Watching this film is like watching mud dry. Obviously I have a definite prejudice but its distinctly like "About Schmidt", another snorer in which absolutely nothing happens. I found it impossible to care about what happened with these characters other than to hope, as the film progressed, that they didn't linger in old age any longer than necessary. There were many extraneous scenes (the old actor walking, lingering on subsidiary characters in bars and coffee shops) as if these added in any way to advancing the plot or developing character. There appears to be an audience for films of this type but it is so far from important films about the challenges of advancing age like "Wild Strawberries", "Men With Guns" or "Ikiru", as to be a parody.
fredjohnjohn
Tedium taken to a level too boring to describe. Scenes go on and on ...... The actors look very uneasy at least I think they do as most of the time the light is very bad or the Director has set afocus on something removed from the characters.John Malkovitch is wasted and Piccoli seems bemused by the lack of any coherent storyline.An experience for insomniacs only.
phranger
This is a superbly played, superbly framed film about a very interesting idea. It is simply three times too long. The film follows an aging actor, Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli), from the moment he learns his wife, their only child and her husband died in a car accident, to the moment he suddenly turns old.Valence, who is either shown or heard in every scene, has very few words to say except when playing, first in Ionesco's Le Roi se meurt, then in the Tempest (both in French) and last while shooting a film in English, Joyce's Ulysses. That last role ends with the title words, I'm going back home, when Valence simply walks out rather than deal with his failure to master Joyce's words while keeping the wanted character and pacing.The remaining minutes show him walking in a Paris suburb, from the studio to his home, while mumbling his role in English. This gives us the time to realize that all the while, since his wife's death, he's been sticking close to home, going through the well-known daily habits of his life, and equally well-known roles. Only the short appearance in Ulysses would have taken him into new territory. Turning old is choosing not to go outside the life one knows. In Valence's case, it's rather not going outside of what is left of his life, once the most important people in it have been killed.The only other major speaking role belongs to Valence's agent, Georges (Antoine Chappey). Unfortunately, it is marred by an absence of those concrete details that convince the viewer that this is not sketch for a character, but a living human being. One scene, for instance, has Valence refuse a TV role which Georges is pushing because of the money involved, but Georges only gets to call it "lots", without giving even an approximation.That deficiency in realistic detail mars other aspects of the film too. However, John Malkovich, playing the American film director, breaks through, he is quite convincing. My suspicion is that he wrote his own lines.
Even if the deficiency were fixed, though, Oliveira would still only have material for thirty minutes. His own failure is in not facing up to that. But Piccoli's playing is sublime, and the wordless showing of Valence's implicit choices through well-framed moments, is also a lesson in filming.
