Mirror of Life: Manoel de Oliveira 1996–2004

Seventeen years on, Rosenbaum’s appreciation of Oliveira’s work remains the best introduction to the films in the series. “If he deserves to be regarded as a master—and I believe he does—his mastery belongs partially in an eccentric category of his own invention, comparable to that of Thelonious Monk as an idiosyncratic jazz pianist,” wrote Rosenbaum. “And it’s a mastery of sound and image that took shape fairly early—even though, as a director of actors, his foregrounding of artificial styles of performance doesn’t always enhance the technical gifts of his players. A few of Oliveira’s films are worth seeing principally for their actors: Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997) offers Marcello Mastroianni’s last screen performance (as an Oliveira surrogate); the all-star cast of A Talking Picture [2003] includes Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich (in a hilarious turn as a charming if self-absorbed American cruise ship captain), Irene Papas, Stefania Sandrelli, and Leonor Silveira.” And the “best turn” from another Oliveira regular, his grandson, Ricardo Trêpa, “probably comes in the decorous but static The Fifth Empire [2004], in which he plays clueless, despotic King Sebastian I (1544–78).”

BAM’s series opens with Anxiety (1998)—also known as Inquietude—a triptych drawn from disparate literary sources that places high on Rosenbaum’s ranked list of Oliveira’s features. Party (1996) lands considerably lower, but it did win Oliveira a Portuguese Golden Globe; and who can resist a comedic turn from Michel Piccoli? Piccoli also stars in I’m Going Home (2001), a “deeply felt story of an actor coming to the end of a long personal run,” as Manohla Dargis described it in the Los Angeles Times. I’m Going Home is “by far the most approachable of the director's recent films, with an emotional depth that's true to life and a streamlined narrative that for long stretches barely contains a word.”

The Letter (1999), a riff on Madame de Lafayette’s 1678 novel The Princess of Cleves starring Chiara Mastroianni, won the Jury Prize in Cannes. Word and Utopia (2000) won a critics’ prize in Venice, where Porto of My Childhood (2001), an autobiographical nonfiction feature peppered with reenactments and narrated by Oliveira himself, won the UNESCO Award.

Writing for Sight and Sound in 2008, Jonathan Romney suggested that the stylistic restraint of Oliveira’s late films “pays off in The Uncertainty Principle (2002), where the flatness counterpoints the mischief of a narrative that is effectively a high-society soap, the measured tone giving way to an unexpected climax as a gang of devil-masked intruders executes a firebomb attack on a nightclub.” Romney found that “what Oliveira is absolutely committed to is the game-like nature of film, and playing with form and expectation. However we read them, Oliveira’s comic touches and abrupt jolts cannot be separated from his overall seriousness, which variously manifests itself as austerity, doominess, prolixity, or in all honesty, downright ponderousness. All these clashing registers are part of the seriousness of gaming, and Oliveira is a playful filmmaker to the highest degree.”

Oliveira’s “adaptations preserve the outmoded conventions of their source material,” wrote Ben Sachs in the Chicago Reader in 2015, “and his contemporary-set films channel the narrative strategies of previous centuries as well. In his work from the late 1970s on, Oliveira employed a rigorous, poker-faced style—staging the action in frontward compositions reminiscent of classical portraiture and eliciting opaque performances from his actors—that allowed him to present those conventions without comment. It was as though the past was speaking through him, not the other way around.”

At the A.V. Club, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky described Oliveira’s style as “minimalist, artificial, and easygoing, pitched somewhere between the long-take modernism of the European art film and the classical tradition of nineteenth-century literature and theater.” For J. Hoberman in the Village Voice, “these productions seem as visionary as Robert Wilson’s operas.” And at Senses of Cinema, Wheeler Winston Dixon has written that Oliveira developed an approach that was “so uniquely his own as to be instantly identifiable, something like the rigorousness of Straub and Huillet with a more emotional and less didactic edge . . . One of the things that strikes me about Oliveira’s films is their continual ability to surprise, and despite the seeming severity of his cinematic syntax, there’s still an air of youthfulness about his work.”