Cinema, Manoel de Oliveira and Me - O Cinema, Manoel de Oliveira and Eu, Directed by João Botelho
Cinema, Manoel de Oliveira and Me - O Cinema, Manoel de Oliveira and Eu
Directed by João Botelho
Cast: Mariana Dias, António Durães, Ângela Marques, Maria João Pinho, Leonor Silveira, Marcello Urgeghe, Miguel Nunes
Country: Portugal
Year: 2016
Review by Roberto Matteucci
Manoel Candido Pinto de Oliveira was born on December 11, 1908 in Oporto, Portugal.
He always died in Oporto on April 2, 2015, at 106 years old. He dies while he was directing a movie, despite his age. He had done many work in his long life but he dies while he was doing his favorite activity: make movie. Definitely, de Oliveira was a man of another age.
Thus, in an interview, the director Botelho describes him:
"Vanity, elegant, good manners and good principles. This was de Oliveira in his private life. He came from a good family, driver of sports cars and aerial pilot, a jumping athlete using the auction that he needs half an hour to prepare for the leap, cared for in hairstyle and dress, seductive and dandy. " (1)
Add his studies in a Jesuits school, a farm to be run and we can understand his character.
But his passion was cinema. A thwarted love because he begins with a slow start until he reaches a fast hyperactivity when he was over sixty years.
His first film is in 1931, the second in 1942, then there is another jump until he reaches 1956 with the third. It is in 1972 the year that he turns into a stakhanovite of the film producing almost a movie a year. His new hyperactivity depends on many many years of repressed inactivity.
The beautiful film about his cinema, O Cinema, Manoel de Oliveira and Eu by director João Botelho, presented at the 53rd Pesaro Film Festival, doesn't talk directly about the life of de Oliveira.
Botelho tells us about de Oliveira character in a special documentary. In the first part plays close attention to his films, styles, anecdotes. But in the second part, the love for the Master is shown in its entirety.
It starts showing a black and white photo of 1980. Manoel de Oliveira was filming Conversa Acabada. The director was João Botelho in his first direction and de Oliveira interpreted a priest. In the photograph there is a young Botelho with Manoel in cassock dress. A connection with a past era, represented with nostalgia by Botelho.
From the picture, he returns back in time, before World War II, when Manoel began his cinema career. We learn about techniques, style, suggestions of the Master, as in a film lesson and accompanied by scenes of his films.
Botelho recounts a conservative Oliveira as a man, as a politician, as a life style, while "the only field in which he was not conservative but very progressive was cinema". (2)
He was also a revolutionary in the courage of the themes, starting with love for Portugal and especially for the city of his life and his death: Oporto.
The city of the river, the harbor, and so many little kids perhaps grew too fast.
Funny anecdotes have the function of encouraging the myth of the Master, because an active and popular 106-year-old man certainly has some good secrets to discover.
We learn that he drinks every night a whiskey glass because, he says, it dilates the arteries and lengthens life.
That is, we learn that, as a housewife, watched the Brazilian soap opera for relaxation and because they helped him not to think and forget about life around.
Whiskey and soap opera, certainly a nice combination for a movie Master.
The second part is a film in the film.
Botelho bows to the Master and delights to direct a subject of Oliveira, who set aside because he did not make time to realize it: it is Prostituição ou a Mulher que passa:
"One of his projects was A Prostituição, a story he recounted me. I found it interesting because it was a typical story of de Oliveira, an original tale where the ideas of sin, punishment, perversion, and death went hand in hand. But the subject was summed up in half a dozen sentences, there was no dialogue, it was almost an anecdote. I developed the plot and I thought - because I still think both fiction and documentary is cinema - that I need a striking break in my movie. The black and white option and the idea of the mute represent the desire to return to the origins of the innocence of primitive cinema. " (3)
The gratitude is realized in the preferred field by the master, Botelho directed the movie according the desires and the style of de Oliveira. The story is totally different from the first part but at the same time connected. We enter an ancient world, we relax, "the cinema has too many images, too much speed", he complained - rightly – de Oliveira. So the short movie is in black and white, mute and so slow, could we imagine something more distant from current cinema?
The theme also is old style. It's the story of a girl with deformed hands. Always she wears gloves to hide them; At home, he is mistreated by his father and forced to flee, reaching the senior sister employed in a luxury brothel. Being very beautiful is finding work in the same brothel, achieving a great success of men. He does his job with great diligence, wearing continually white gloves even in intimacy.
Girl's misadventures will continue until the final cathartic. Blame, sin, punishment will fall like a divine lightning on immoral transgressors: "Everyone who commits a sin he will eventually die." (4)
An elegant, simple, pure melodrama, an example of gratitude accomplished with great emotion.
Manoel de Oliveira would have appreciated the tribute, perhaps just a little bit annoyed because he could not conclude it personally, but no doubt about grateful for such devotion. Because de Oliveira loved his audience, he did not skip a premiere, a presentation of his own movie at a festival awaiting applause.
(1) http://quinlan.it/2016/08/30/intervista-joao-botelho/
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOjxr6yMJCw&t=179s