Cinema Short Takes: Voyage To The Beginning Of The World

The face is gaunt--ravaged but handsome, like a weathered statue--and the skull is nearly visible through the skin. The body is hunched; it needs a cane for support. Getting a first glimpse of Marcello Mastroianni here, the viewer is not surprised that this was the last film he completed before his death in late 1996. Was he only 72? He looks a decade older, frailer. A closeup could be like an autopsy, were it not for the actor's perennial ease and grace before the camera's eye.

But there is no ghoulish sentiment in the rarefied pleasures afforded by Manoel de Oliveira's luminous film. The Franco-Portuguese Voyage to the Beginning of the World is a fable about old age reconciling itself to memory and destiny. Two histories intertwine: a veteran director, also named Manoel (Mastroianni), goes back to the places of his childhood; and an ancient Portuguese woman (Isabel de Castro) meets the French-born son (Jean-Yves Gautier) of her long-lost brother. The old woman is wary of her Francophone nephew--she keeps asking, "Why doesn't he speak our speech?"--until the nephew convinces her, in a heartbreaking scene, that blood is thicker than language.

As for Manoel's recollections, they are engaging, autumnal; he wears the wizened smile of a man who knows he is visiting his youth for the last time. It is easy to see this as Mastroianni's testament, but it is also Oliveira's. This amazing auteur, whose spare, poignant films (Doomed Love, The Cannibals) are rarely seen in the U.S., has been directing since 1929--and has made a film every year of the '90s. Oliveira will be 90 in December. On the evidence of this vigorous Voyage, he is just hitting his stride.

--By Richard Corliss