Also this issue:

City of the Future
Restored after 75 years, Metropolis still leads the way.
-Sam Adams

Neo Metro
Restoring Metropolis.
-Sam Adams

Like Grandfather, Like Son
A detective whose father was executed for murder investigates his stepson for the same crime.
-Cindy Fuchs

September 5-11, 2002

movies

After Life

Homeward bound: Michel Piccoli plays an actor in his twilight years.

An aging thespian copes with loss in I’m Going Home.

I'm Going Home

by Sam Adams

I'm Going HomeWritten and directed by Manoel de Oliveira A Milestone Films release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse

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It’s a good long while in I’m Going Home before we hear Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli) speak any of his own words, and even when he finally does, writer-director Manoel de Oliveira tantalizes us further by focusing for several minutes on Gilbert’s shoe instead of his face. Gilbert is a famous actor of stage and screen, and we first see him on stage, performing the closing minutes of Ionesco’s Exit the King -- or rather, having them performed around him, as de Oliveira stages much of the scene with Piccoli’s back to the camera. As Gilbert plays out Ionesco’s burlesque of an old man grasping at power while his life slips away, we see two men slip into the theater mid-performance and make their way backstage, but it isn’t until the play has ended and the actors have taken their curtain calls, that we find out what the interruption is all about. Without giving it away, it’s safe to say that Gilbert’s life has been reduced in an instant to zero. And yet still, he utters not a peep.

We rejoin the story "some time later," and Gilbert has settled into a new routine. There is still the stage, this time a lengthy excerpt from The Tempest, and Gilbert's grandson, whom he catches only in brief glimpses, since Gilbert spends his nights at the theater and the boy his days at school. (Don't French thespians get Mondays off?) The 93-year-old de Oliveira advances the plot in brief bursts, as when Gilbert's agent pitches him a violent TV drama, an offer he turns down in disgust, or he's approached by a respected American director (John Malkovich) to fill a vacancy in his film version of Ulysses. But mostly, the film savors the taste of Gilbert's long, empty days, where he sits sipping coffee in a local cafe, always at the same table. (Sharp-eyed viewers will note that Gilbert is reading the exact same newspaper in each iteration, a subtle sign that de Oliveira is more in fable than fact.) In a burlesque of Gilbert's routine, de Oliveira repeats the same setup several times, where a pinched-looking businessman swoops in just as Gilbert leaves. It's his table, too.

Piccoli's performance is informed by a great, slow sadness, but also by the ability of the man whose pleasures are few to take solace from the smallest things -- a painting in a shop window, a splendid new pair of shoes. (From the clandestine dancing of his feet, you can tell Gilbert's more interested in his brogans than the man sitting across from him.) The film's energy falters toward the end, largely because the on-set scenes from Ulysses make their point quickly but belabor it at length. (Once we see Gilbert in his goofy wig, we don't need to be told he's wrong for the part.) I'm Going Home's ending is a grace note rather than a resolving chord, a semicolon instead of a period. But if it's not clear what it's meant to suggest, it does instill the desire to ponder that same question, even if the man with the answers insists on keeping his mouth shut.

(sam@citypaper.net)