O meu caso

What does he want, this stranger whom we later recognize in the skin of Job in the Old Testament, he who invades this boulevard theatre from which none will leave? And this room, which has not yet, apparently (and in this film of repeats it is our turn to repeat, apparently), any spectators, why does it feel so empty? But no, these viewers have already been seen. They sat in front of the stage during the opening credits: it’s a film crew, the director among them ordering the clapperboard. The stranger, Luis Miguel Cintra wants to present his “case” but we will never know what exactly what it’s abour. With him is performed (yet) another play, by José Regio and adapted by Manoel de Oliveira. The curtain goes up, the camera films, a screen will appear behind the curtain and the video at the end will show the film shoot, the play performed. Cinema as audio-visual registry of theatre? Are theatre and cinema the same thing? So does cinema not exist because what is real would be theatre? Let’s place quotation marks around these three questions because it is Oliveira who is speaking. During filming, from the theatre, he gives us his seriousness, whereas for film it is his artifices. And he also shoots this blending and its opposite, the exposure of the mechanism, its ritual. And the film crew becomes, with us, the audience that it itself is creating. My Case, one of the most beautiful, dense and unknown pieces by Oliveira, is the film in which disorder between theatre and film invokes the absurd (Beckett) in order to return to the ancient and sacred word: the Book of Job. A film made of three paintings and three key moments: the Mona Lisa, Guernica, The Ideal City. A film about the loss of logic and grieving for that loss. Let’s take a risk: a film of chaos which finds faith. (FF)