michel piccoli Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Milos Forman has coaxed and guided some great performances over the years, notably Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus and Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon. But he has rarely been praised for directing women, as evidenced by his awkward handling of Natalie Portman in the awful Goya's Ghosts (37 screens). The movie earned advance attention for its nude/sex scene, but will probably be remembered for fitting Portman with a set of humorously bad fake teeth and for her self-consciously dazed walk, newly released from prison, through a chaotic town square. Forman may be to blame, but Portman is out there, on the screen, all alone and in front of everyone.

The Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, 98 years old as of this writing, is a walking bit of cinema history. Born in Oporto (where they make port wine) he reportedly worked on a film as early as 1928 and made his official directorial debut in 1931 with a short documentary, Working on the Douro River. Even though Hollywood had implemented sound by then, many other countries had not. And so Oliveira carries the distinction of being not only the oldest movie director still active, but also the only movie director to have begun in the silent era. In Europe, he's considered a master, with several films already in the canon. Despite all this, only two of Oliveira's films have received any kind of regular distribution in the United States, I'm Going Home (2002), which I consider a masterpiece, and the slightly more problematic, but still excellent A Talking Picture (2004). A third, Belle Toujours, opened briefly this summer in New York but has already gone.

Oliveira has made the majority of his films -- more than thirty of them -- since 1979, when he was already past seventy. Because of this, his films tend to be patient and contemplative, or to Western audiences, just plain "slow." He's like an old man driving a car in front of you; perhaps he's keeping us from getting to our destination faster, but if we could only see things from his point of view, maybe we could enjoy the drive a little more. He's learned how to really stop and appreciate things and he has pretty much earned the right to make any movie he feels like making. So he sets his sights on a sort of sequel to Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour (1967), which, in other hands, would have been a travesty. And though it reunites two of the main characters from that masterpiece, it actually turns out to be more of a tribute or an epilogue than a sequel.

By the time you read this I will be in Portugal, and so it seemed appropriate that I should take a moment to talk about Portugal's greatest cinematic export, film director Manoel de Oliveira. Oliveira holds a curious record: he's the oldest living film director, and the only living film director to have worked in the silent era. His first film, Working on the Douro River, was an 18-minute documentary made in 1931. Hollywood had converted to sound by then, but many other countries were still silent. (Reportedly, he worked as an extra in a film as early as 1928.)

Currently, Oliveira is 97 years old and has a new movie out, Belle Toujours (additionally, he has finished one other and is in production on two more). I haven't seen Belle Toujours yet; it opened in June in New York and appeared like a blip on the box office chart. It's a sequel of sorts to Luis Bunuel's 1967 masterpiece Belle de Jour, with Michel Piccoli reprising his role as Henri Husson, who once helped sexually awaken the married, bored Severine (Catherine Denueve), turning her on to a life of daytime sexual depravity and mild sadomasochism. Years later, Severine (now played by Bulle Ogier, from Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) meets Henri once again and the two come to terms with their bizarre past.