By Jonathan Romney
For eight decades Manoel de Oliveira has played with audiences' expectations of cinema. Now, at the age of 100, this contradictory figure is not merely Portugal's most important director, he's an international treasure. By Jonathan Romney
As Michel Piccoli's character walks off at the end of Manoel de Oliveira's Belle toujours (2006), waiters clearing the salonwhere he just hosted a dinner à deux share observations on their client: "Quel drôle de type" - "Oui, quel homme étrange." A funny guy, a strange man: you might say the same of Manoel de Oliveira. The veteran Portuguese film-maker is drôle indeed, a farceur and proud of it, yet deadly serious at the same time. Oliveira is an anomaly too, not just among film-makers, but among human beings: he celebrates his hundredth birthday on 12 December this year, having made roughly a film a year since the early 1980s, and apparently showing no inclination to stop.
A few years ago I interviewed Oliveira onstage in London after a screening of his 2001 film I'm Going Home (Je rentre à la maison), starring Michel Piccoli. The director was in mischievous mood. I started to ask about his first film, from 1931, but Oliveira was having none of it. "When I made my first film," he said, holding his hand a foot above the ground, "I was only this big. Then I made a second film, and I was this big," he gestured a little higher. "Now I have made a film with Michel Piccoli, and I am this big" - the 93-year-old Oliveira climbed on to his chair and stood arms outstretched, receiving an ovation of several minutes.
Outrageous as this showmanship is, it's also curiously modest - as though it had really taken eight decades of film-making and Piccoli's blessing for Oliveira to achieve greatness. Oliveira is certainly a great director, although in a singular way. Critics have compared him to the likes of Buñuel and Dreyer, yet his films remain outside the canon. Wilfully uncommercial and hard to see outside festivals, these eccentric works can be elusive even at their least obscure, as in the case of the approachable yet slippery Belle toujours. Because most admirers have seen relatively few of Oliveira's films, there is little consensus about which are his best. And because of his longevity, his pre-eminence as Portugal's national auteur, and his mythical aura far beyond that of your average 'grand old man', there is often resistance to acknowledging Oliveira's status. Another nonconformist Portuguese director, the late João César Monteiro, once wrote an article questioning the merit of the man he called "the fossil of Oporto", before grudgingly recognising Oliveira as "the greatest young Portuguese director". That was in 1974, when Oliveira was only 66.
It's hard to suspend considerations of mystique when trying to appraise Oliveira's work. He has provoked gasps by dancing in his film Inquietude (1998) or, on his regular visits to Cannes, by bounding up the Palais steps. A former racing driver and athlete, Oliveira was always in good shape: 1930s photos of him heaving a vaulting pole or carrying a bathing beauty on his shoulders reveal a Grecian-style muscleman and shameless glamour hound.
Only four Oliveira films have been released in Britain, and only since the early 1990s. Some films are available on DVD, with French or Spanish subtitles. As for the quartet that some consider Oliveira's masterpieces, the 'Tetralogy of Frustrated Love' that includes the four-hour-plus Doomed Love (Amor de Perdição, 1978), you'll be lucky ever to see the first three.
For an international audience, Oliveira's difficulty derives in no small part from his preoccupation with Portuguese history and culture. Some of his films are cosmopolitan: their literary references and models include Flaubert, Ionesco, Beckett and Dostoevsky; A Talking Picture (Um Filme Falado , 2003), which muses on the fate of western culture after 9/11, has dialogue in French, English, Italian, Greek and Portuguese. But Oliveira returns obsessively to home-grown material: the life and work of 19th-century writer Camilo Castelo Branco, subject of 1992's docudrama The Day of Despair (O Dia do Desespero); 20th-century plays by Jose Regio and Prista Monteiro; the novels of Oliveira's frequent co-writer Agustina Bessa-Luis. The gruelling and austere Word and Utopia (Palavra e Utopia, 2000) is a rather Straubian setting of the writings of the 17th-century Jesuit preacher Father Antonio Vieira, surely qualifying it as one of the most wilfully uncommercial films ever.
Oliveira's sceptical nationalism sets him apart in world cinema. A key Oliveira theme is the specificity of Portuguese culture, which goes hand in hand with the nation's geographic marginality on Europe's western rim. There is the country's relative linguistic isolation, together with the political stasis it endured from 1932 to 1974 under the Estado Novo regime of dictator Antonio Salazar. And, looking further back, there is nostalgia for a lost dream of empire that collapsed in the 16th century. Oliveira's Portugal is an idea predicated on singularity, isolation, loss, memory and eclipsed glory. All these are factors, perhaps, of the national cult of saudade (melancholy, or the blues), although Oliveira treats this with wry scepticism.
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