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TRANSCRIPT OF COMPUSERVE REVIEW
I'M GOING HOME (Je rentre a la maison)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten
Director: Manoel de Oliveira Writer: Manoel de Oliveira Cast: Michel Piccoli, Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich, Antoine Chappey, Leonor Baldaque, Leonor Silveira, Ricardo Trepa Screened at: NY Film Festival, 9/27/01
If you were elderly and afflicted with an incurable disease, would you take a drug that would give you 3 years of life but one which would be accompanied with considerable pain, or would you refuse the prescription thereby guaranteeing just two months of life but without any pain? Surprisingly, a major study recently showed that the vast majority of older people want to live as long as they can, even if they have to suffer considerable discomfort. Many of those who so chose do not have what people would call deeply creative avocations, but still...you can probably believe that someone who is living to the fullest, particularly if he or she is celebrated in the field, would want to enjoy life as long as possible. However, what if a creative person were losing his special talent gradually as he approaches the age of 80? This is the subject of Manoel de Oliveira contemplative film, one which could scarcely be separated from the director's own concerns. After all, de Oliveira is 92 years old, having dabbled in his early days as an actor and having directed all sorts of features, long and short, for children and for thinking adults.
"I'm Going Home," his seventh work to be screened at the New York Film Festival, pays homage to its lead actor, the 76-year-old Michel Piccoli, perhaps France's greatest living thesp. A veteran of some one hundred features, Piccoli has turned up in movies beginning with "The Bellman" in 1945 and most recently in "One Hundred and One Nights." This time he plays an aging actor, hit on for autographs even by youthful enthusiasts as he walks the streets of Paris. De Oliveira opens on the latest staged work of the famed performer, Gilbert Valence, in the title role of Eugene Ionesco's play "Exit the King," holding Sabine Lancelin's lens a considerable length of time on the performance since the king's concerns parallel's Valence's. The king is facing his last day on earth at a time that the earth is collapsing. Yet he fights desperately against the inevitable. Once controlling his life and nature, ordering men beheaded and ordering thunderbolts from on high, he recognizes himself as a man rotting to death who could end up treated in no better fashion than Ozymandias. He is disintegrating.
But the actor in reality is not in such dire straits, though his own world is collapsing around him. He has just been told that his wife, daughter, and son-in-law have all been killed in an auto accident. He is given charge of his 6-year-old grandson whom he adores. He appears to meet the challenge or raising the cute young lad but his bigger test lies in his career. Unwilling to take a role in some Hollywood-style TV dreck despite the money, he accepts a small role from American director John Crawford (John Malkovich), an English speaking job in a modern adaptation of "Ulysses." He accepts, and, faltering on the job, he begins to accept the end of his career.
This proves for Michel Piccoli a marvelous performance and, in fact, De Oliveira may have been more interested in giving veneration to France's gift to the world than in presenting a compelling plot. Piccoli is in virtually every scene, the world seeming to revolve around him as it does when he plays the role of the king, but he elicits the pain that must be felt in every human being who feels his mortality, particularly when the termination of life is accompanied by a collapse in a promising career.
Not Rated. Running time: 90 minutes. (C) 2001 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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