In updating my list of best foreign films by country, I wanted to add Portugal. I’ve seen great movies in Portuguese, but they are from Brazil. I realized that I had not seen anything made by the most famous of Portuguese directors, Manoel de Oliveira (born in 1908 and still making movies!). I realized that I had one, "Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo" (Voyage to the Beginning of the World,1997), which was the last movie with the great Marcello Mastroianni. Mastroianni plays a Francophone director named Manoel, who seems to have gone to primary school in Portugal and to have forgotten the language.

Through the first half of the movie Manoel reminisces in an automobile and at a few stops and landmarks that no longer mean anything (the ruins of a Grand Hotel, a primitivist statue that used to holding up a grape  trellis, etc.). With him (and the audience) in the car are Judite (Leonor Silveira) and Duarte (Diogo Dória), a younger woman and man both of whom speak French and Portuguese, and a man older than them but younger than Manoel who also speaks French with no Portuguese.

In the second half of the film, it turns out that it is this last one, an actor named Afonso (Jean-Yves Gautier) who is the one who is really “going home,” though to a home where he has never been. His father left Lugar do Teso, in the Alto Minho (the rocky northeast of Portugal), at the age of 14 during the late 1930s and only returned once for a visit, though extracting money from the family.

Afonso’s aunt Maria (Isabel María Bastos Osorio de Castro e Oliveira) remains resentful and is very reluctant to recognize a nephew who does not speak Portuguese and might be after an inheritance. His melting her suspicious resistance is the only thing other than a few process shots of scenery to provide any interest beyond seeing the genial Mastroianni in his last movie. The wisp of a movie is based loosely on the experiences of French actor Yves Afonso while shooting a film in Portugal in 1987,  subtitle at the end reveals.

Life is hard in the Afonso village and young people have fled (as Afonso’s father did). It is not as primitive as the Calabrian town beyond where Christ (Christianity) stopped in Francesco Rosi ‘s 1979 “Christ Stopped at Eboli” (an infinitely better movie that starred
Gian Maria Volonté).

Some praised the serenity of the movie. Mastroianni looks serene, but the movie seems to me to lack any pulse through lengthy takes and a mix of high-angle long shots and claustrophobic in-car ones. Afonso sees the graves of his father’s ancestors, but does not learn anything about what his father was like before Afonso was born. The others are just along for the ride and to translate. The glacial pace of the movie is not aided by the subtitled translations from French to Portuguese and from Portuguese to French (though with some difference visible in the English-language subtitles).

(The DVD has a trailer for the movie and for two other Strand releases, nothing more.)

©2011, Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: No

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