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At 93, most directors are content to remain at home polishing their lifetime achievement awards. Not Manoel de Oliviera, the Portuguese-born, Paris-based auteur who has been getting some of the best reviews of his distinguished career with this elegiac portrait of the artist as an old man.
However, while this gentle and affecting melodrama will have luvvies in raptures, it's far too slight and introspective to appeal to anything wider than a niche audience. And while Gallic veteran Michel Piccoli (who, at 76, is no spring chicken either) delivers a rich and subtle performance at its centre, the hefty slices of theatre that punctuate the narrative are drably filmed and mind-numbingly tedious.
After playing a dying monarch opposite Catherine Deneuve in Eugene Ionesco's "Exit the King", Gilbert Valence (Piccoli) walks off stage to discover his wife, daughter and son-in-law have been killed in a car accident. Although the tragedy seems to leave him unmoved, the delayed shock takes its toll on the ageing thespian, forcing him to confront his own mortality and accept that the time has come for him to make his final exit.
Piccoli is at his best when bonding with his grandson, rebuffing his agent's suggestion he takes a lucrative role in a TV series or gamely grappling with Joycean English in a screen adaptation of Ulysses, meticulously directed by Malkovich in a hilariously po-faced cameo. But what, if anything, do these isolated and unconnected excerpts from an actor's life add up to? Sadly, not very much.
In French with English subtitles.
