If one is told that someone who is now 103 year is still actively working as a director, I'm quite sure that the chances of one believing it would be more or less the same as one were told that he has won the first prize of the latest government lottery. Yet that's not a lie. Yesterday, I saw a beautiful film by the famous centenarian Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira. It's a screen adaptation of a drama called "O Gebo e a Sombra" by Raul Brandão. But to me, it's more a filmed version of a stage play than a "motion picture) meeting the strictest requirements of the Aristotelian poetics for drama: the unity of time, place and character. Except for one outside scene which is just outside of the sitting room of where the drama began, the entire film took place within that sitting room of the hero Gebo ( Michael Lonsdale), normally inhabited only by his wife Candidnha (Jeanne Moreau) and his daughter in law Doroteia (Claudia Cardinale) though occasionally visited by their neighbors Sofia (Leonor Silveira) and Chamiço ( Luís Miguel Cintra).
As the film opens, we see Candidnha anxious waiting for the return of his husband Gebo, a poor accounts clerk, saying that she longs to hear from him news about their long lost son João (Luis Miguel Cintra). They lived under difficult circumstances, barely surviving. Finally he returns with a huge trunk full of money and a ledger on which he had to enter the details of all the bills that his company would be collecting. He asked for a cafe and then continues to work. Candidnha asks him to recount to her all the details of his recent encounter with his son. He could give no concrete details. All he could say is that he knew in the dark from his eyes that it was indeed his son but they didn't talk except that he asked after her. Candidnha was ecstatic and wanted her husband to recount everything to her the next day. When she is gone, we hear Gebo telling Dorotheia that he didn't really see her husband but he had to keep his wife's hopes alive. Then the neighbors came, chitchatting about how hard life is for everyone and Chanmico revealed that when he was young, he played the flute and how only art could redeem the dreariness of life. Then unannounced, João arrived and sneered at his theory. He asked them if they knew the taste of hunger and how when one is driven by it one had to steal and rob if need be to stay alive. When he father went to sleep. He used a screw driver to break the lock where his father kept a casket of money that he collected for his company and made off in the dark. In the morning, the police arrived with his son and said they thought that he was the one who stole it from the true owner. At that point, Gebo announced that the real thief was he!
Throughout static tableaux like scenes captured with stunningly beautiful shots from a fixed camera with predominantly yellow candle light to accompany the unfolding action, (more accurately the dialogues) in the dark of the night, we feel a sense of death overhanging everything. It was not until the film ends that we see the light of day when the police brought his son in as the culprit. Until he appears, it seems that João is just a shadow, a figment of the imagination, a myth, a legend and that Gebo is the model of honest hard work. But ironically, it takes a thief to expose another thief, the son to expose the father, the truth to expose the lie. Gebo turns out to be the most despicable kind of liar. He lies to himself, the way he lies to his wife. Is Oliveira trying to say ironically, that all hard work are lies and that only his art is something which deserves to stay?
The quality of the acting is perfect. So is the use of music which helps create the right kind of atmosphere for Oliveira reflection upon the ironies and hypocrisies of life. The claustrophobic space of the sitting room where he constantly pretends to be working hard is almost viscerally suffocating and fits in perfectly with the closure of the mind of Gebo to reality. My hats off to this centenarian. Long may he live!
As the film opens, we see Candidnha anxious waiting for the return of his husband Gebo, a poor accounts clerk, saying that she longs to hear from him news about their long lost son João (Luis Miguel Cintra). They lived under difficult circumstances, barely surviving. Finally he returns with a huge trunk full of money and a ledger on which he had to enter the details of all the bills that his company would be collecting. He asked for a cafe and then continues to work. Candidnha asks him to recount to her all the details of his recent encounter with his son. He could give no concrete details. All he could say is that he knew in the dark from his eyes that it was indeed his son but they didn't talk except that he asked after her. Candidnha was ecstatic and wanted her husband to recount everything to her the next day. When she is gone, we hear Gebo telling Dorotheia that he didn't really see her husband but he had to keep his wife's hopes alive. Then the neighbors came, chitchatting about how hard life is for everyone and Chanmico revealed that when he was young, he played the flute and how only art could redeem the dreariness of life. Then unannounced, João arrived and sneered at his theory. He asked them if they knew the taste of hunger and how when one is driven by it one had to steal and rob if need be to stay alive. When he father went to sleep. He used a screw driver to break the lock where his father kept a casket of money that he collected for his company and made off in the dark. In the morning, the police arrived with his son and said they thought that he was the one who stole it from the true owner. At that point, Gebo announced that the real thief was he!
Throughout static tableaux like scenes captured with stunningly beautiful shots from a fixed camera with predominantly yellow candle light to accompany the unfolding action, (more accurately the dialogues) in the dark of the night, we feel a sense of death overhanging everything. It was not until the film ends that we see the light of day when the police brought his son in as the culprit. Until he appears, it seems that João is just a shadow, a figment of the imagination, a myth, a legend and that Gebo is the model of honest hard work. But ironically, it takes a thief to expose another thief, the son to expose the father, the truth to expose the lie. Gebo turns out to be the most despicable kind of liar. He lies to himself, the way he lies to his wife. Is Oliveira trying to say ironically, that all hard work are lies and that only his art is something which deserves to stay?
The quality of the acting is perfect. So is the use of music which helps create the right kind of atmosphere for Oliveira reflection upon the ironies and hypocrisies of life. The claustrophobic space of the sitting room where he constantly pretends to be working hard is almost viscerally suffocating and fits in perfectly with the closure of the mind of Gebo to reality. My hats off to this centenarian. Long may he live!
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