Michel Piccoli In Manoel de Oliveira's I'm Going Home

I sincerely urge you to watch this little masterpiece from the Portugeese auteur. Michel Piccoli plays a grand old theatre actor. and John Malkovich is wonderful as a TV director.

 

SYNOPSIS

In one of De Oliveira’s crowning achievements, the great Michel Piccoli stars as Gilbert Valence, a In one of De Oliveira’s crowning achievements, the great Michel Piccoli stars as Gilbert Valence, a celebrated actor who loses his daughter and son-in-law in a car crash, and gradually puts the pieces of his life back together. To be specific, we watch as Valence more or less returns to his daily routine of morning coffee at a sidewalk cafe, afternoon shopping expeditions, and the continual search for the next great part, including his casting as Buck Mulligan in a Franco-American co-production of Ulysses directed by John Malkovich! Precisely because Oliveira doesn’t dwell on Valence’s grief, every scene in the film seems somehow shaded by melancholy and the human impulse to carry on—a theme that resonated with uncanny power during the film’s NYFF premiere, mere weeks after the 9/11 attacks. –NYFF

 

 actor who loses his daughter and son-in-law in a car crash, and gradually puts the pieces of his life back together. To be specific, we watch as Valence more or less returns to his daily routine of morning coffee at a sidewalk cafe, afternoon shopping expeditions, and the continual search for the next great part, including his casting as Buck Mulligan in a Franco-American co-production of Ulysses directed by John Malkovich! Precisely because Oliveira doesn’t dwell on Valence’s grief, every scene in the film seems somehow shaded by melancholy and the human impulse to carry on—a theme that resonated with uncanny power during the film’s NYFF premiere, mere weeks after the 9/11 attacks. –NYFF