VOYAGE TO THE BEGINING OF THE WORLD
A film review by Pedro Bras Marques
Copyright 1997 Pedro Bras Marques
(This is the translation of a previous review, posted in Portuguese.)
VOYAGE TO THE BEGGINING OF THE WORLD (Viagem ao Principio do Mundo)
Manoel de Oliveira, the only living director in the world that comes way back from the silent era of movies, presents to us his latest opus. This time he goes for a semi-auto-biographic story, a journey to his childhood and adolescence. The action is entirely set in the extreme North of Portugal, in Alto Minho, in villages like Caminha and Castro Laboreiro, visiting people and landscapes that are in the beggining of the Portuguese World. Yes, right to the beggining, because these lands belonged to the embryonic 'Condado Portucalense', whose capital was Guimaraes, just a couple kilometers away. Also, 'castro' is the word given to the first settled communities in Portugal, even before the arrival of the Romans. Geographically speaking, it is also the place where the portuguese territory begins, to those who come from the north, and where the river Minho meets the vast ocean, watched by Caminha and the spanish Mount of St. Tecla. Rather curious is Oliveira's option to show us the city and the road by putting the camera in the back of the car, facing the road behind (driven by the real Manoel de Oliveira). The image is a obvious metaphor: the path left behind is no other than every journey in life, all of the memories, life itself. Stoping near the mouth of the river (where it dies...), close to the ferry pier, all the characters listen to Manoel/Mastroianni recalling his childhood in a religious border school, on the other bank of the river, on the other country. The fact is that the other country is much more than just Spain. It's the memory of a past, that the river/time, restrains of reaching. Someone gets a binocular. But the same way as looking at a picture doesn't bring the past back, the binoculars just bring closer what is far away. The river, like the road before, has a begginig and an end, and in between those two points lays what is called journey. The characters are real close to Spain, where the portuguese road ends and where the river finds its grave in the sea. Two dead ends. But we can add a third one: the own directors end, who has 86 glorious and adventurous years. Ironically, Mastroianni, the actor who plays him, does his last perfomance here. The title could well be "Close to the End of the World"... In the movie, everybody knows that there is an end for everything. Is there anything that survives? The answer seems to be negative. The 'Hotel do Peso' lays in ruins and even memory has a lot of difficulty in rebuilding it. The statue of Pedro Macau is still there, just like Atlas holding the World on his back. And it also holds a part of the world of the director, even if the statue had lost an arm...We can even wonder how many memories isn't he still holding...And how many people still keep or have kept the image of the statue as a reference? Who was Pedro Macau? Who put it there? What is he doing there? Isn't this extension of life, what Kundera called 'Imortality'? In other words: can 'imortality' lay in the perpetuity of gestures, thoughts and images, passed from one to another, like a relay race, this time called life. The 'journey' reffered in the title, you guessed it, has several meanings. If there is one journey to the beggining of the director's life, there is also a journey of a french actor to the village that his portuguese father had left when went to France. The french actor had never been to Lusitanian lands, but his wish to know the beggining of his world was stronger. He wants to meet his father's hometown and the people he once knew. He wants to know how his father was, how he behave and how he lived, because he died when the actor was still a child. He is going to meet an old aunt, living in a recess place of a village, that is lost both in time and space. It is an image of the old, rustic and rural Portugal, nowadays called 'real' by the politicians. A way of calling 'typical', to what is just 'poor'... The little village is made of grey stone, so harsh as the wrinkles in the faces of the old people that still manage to survive. Has time stood still since his father's departures? We almost say yes. But his aunt doesn't think that way. And she is annoyed that being the actor her nephew, then "why doesn't he talks our talk"? The fact is that what seemed cristalized, in fact, wasn't. The farewell is made at the graveyard. Everybody's last stop. Life is a journey to be enjoyed and no matter our will to stop the time, we never manage to do so. Our wish of eternity drives us mad and motivate us. We're too important just to...disappear. But, just like the car on the road, where what is back is gone, so it's life. Every little second that has gone won't ever come back. When that Journey comes to an end, it is good to recall it. And if we don't have enough memories, we can always appeal to those of other people, that even though they don't fulfill our need, they don't leave us empty.
-- Pedro
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