Word: manoel
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...Manoel de Oliveira was born in 1908,and made his first film, Douro, Faina Fluvial (Working on the Douro River) in 1931, when he was 22. That documentary, a vital panorama of dockside life in Oporto, Portugal, was shown today, with the director, who will be 100 on December 11, in attendance. Oliveira has been a mainstay in the Cannes competition for a quarter century, providing such sere delights as The Cannibals (with its comic shock of a conclusion), Voyage to the Beginning of the World (Marcello Mastroianni's last great film) and I'm Going Home, with a wonderful...
...redoubt is also crawling with esteemed auteurs, including a couple dozen top-prize winners of Palmes d'Or past. On opening night, a gawker would have seen the cream of world directors in formal dress entering the Grand Palais, from 28-year-old Canadian Sarah Polley to Portugal's Manoel de Oliveira, 98, gamely scaling the 24 red-carpeted steps with as much satisfaction as a man climbing Everest...
...totality is an amazingly vigorous achievement - and not just for an old man. (Only the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, who at 96 has completed 10 feature films in the past decade, has outlasted Bergman.) Saraband is a film worthy of being counted among Bergman's strongest. Which means among the finest there are, or are likely to be, for a while...
...there is no ghoulish sentiment in the rarefied pleasures afforded by Manoel de Oliveira's luminous film. The Franco-Portuguese Voyage to the Beginning of the World is a fable about old age reconciling itself to memory and destiny. Two histories intertwine: a veteran director, also named Manoel (Mastroianni), goes back to the places of his childhood; and an ancient Portuguese woman (Isabel de Castro) meets the French-born son (Jean-Yves Gautier) of her long-lost brother. The old woman is wary of her Francophone nephew--she keeps asking, "Why doesn't he speak our speech?"--until the nephew...
...Manoel's recollections, they are engaging, autumnal; he wears the wizened smile of a man who knows he is visiting his youth for the last time. It is easy to see this as Mastroianni's testament, but it is also Oliveira's. This amazing auteur, whose spare, poignant films (Doomed Love, The Cannibals) are rarely seen in the U.S., has been directing since 1929--and has made a film every year of the '90s. Oliveira will be 90 in December. On the evidence of this vigorous Voyage, he is just hitting his stride...