This is a gem: a small but perfectly formed, perfectly poised and perfectly acted movie, a leisurely and elegant study of an elderly widower and the city in which he is utterly at home: Paris. But it is a study with an intriguing unlocatability of tone. Is it elegiac? Comic? Tragic? Absurd? Are the oscillations that director Manoel De Oliveira brings off between these idioms deliberate or accidental?
The lead actor, Michel Piccoli, gives a performance of dignified vulnerability as Gilbert, a distinguished man of the theatre, who is brought word in his dressing room one night that his wife, together with their daughter and son-in-law, have been killed in a car accident and he must bring up their little boy on his own. We cut to "some time later" and Gilbert is evidently - but enigmatically - over his grief, and living a reasonably contented existence, turning down unsuitable roles in vulgar TV films, fending off a pretty actress with a crush on him and happy only in the company of his grandson. But disaster strikes when he agrees to play young Irishman Buck Mulligan in a screen version of Ulysses (directed by a noted American played by a reticent, distracted John Malkovich) and the preposterous miscasting of this bewildered elderly French actor is brutally apparent from the outset.
De Oliveira devises beautifully judged set pieces on the way to his sad, strange ending: superb visual comedy showing the pleasures of smart new shoes, and how one develops claims to certain tables in certain cafes. But all the time, the tragedy that defines Gilbert's new life is present, just out of frame, and finally, in an act of existential exhaustion, Gilbert announces "I'm going home" and leaves his professional life and disappears into his bedroom - perhaps for the last time. It is a desperately sad account of how we must lay down the burden of life at the end.
The film-set scenes in which Piccoli comes in with a ridiculous wig, braying an Irish song in a heavy French accent, are truly bizarre. Even now, after two viewings of the film, I find it difficult to gauge exactly how ridiculous De Oliveira himself believes them to be. But they are so original, so distinctive, and so hilarious, that fractionally misjudged though they may be, I couldn't wish them any other way. When we saw this bittersweet film at Cannes last year, many wondered if the 93-year-old Manoel De Oliveira was hinting at some kind of valedictory significance. We were wrong. He is back with a new film at Cannes this year. There is plenty of life in the old master yet.
