Vou para casa

It is hard to tell which story is the more important, between that of Gilbert Valence, the actor who returns home at the turn of 2000, and that of its origins. Let’s start with the latter. You’ll see why at the end of the film. Vou Para Casa was the second of five roles played by Michel Piccoli for Manoel de Oliveira. He should have played another character, Girolamo Cattaneo, the Italian Jesuit priest in Palavra e Utopia, the previous film in which Oliveira finally devoted himself entirely to the figure of the priest António Vieira so important in his oeuvre. But Piccoli declined that role at the last minute. With filming already under way, panic then prompted the producers to invite as replacement the Italian actor Renato de Carmine, who duly accepted. He had to speak a very long text that Oliveira, as usual, wanted to shoot as a single static shot. Carmine, without much preparation time, and already 77 years old, made many errors. Tired and humiliated by this incident, he decided to leave the set for a “ritorno a casa”. Deeply moved by the desperation of the great veteran, the filmmaker persuaded him to stay. Indeed, Carmine proved to be extraordinary in the role of Cattaneo. But Oliveira never forgot this accident of shooting. So much so that he decided to make the film Vou Para Casa, his greatest success in France, with Piccoli in the lead role (what an irony of fate!).
Accident? Or rather chance, as this film is built on chance and it is thanks to chance that destiny is manifested: Gilbert’s family (his wife, daughter and son-in-law) are killed in a car accident; a long coveted pair of shoes is finally bought but then stolen one night in Paris; a gag worthy of silent film at the cafe, in which the newspaper Le Monde is installed between Libération and Le Figaro; Buck Mulligan’s role in an impossible film adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses. And the time of chance that never stops fl owing, between The King Dies, the play in which Piccoli plays Gilbert playing Ionesco’s king, and the scene from Shakespeare’s The Tempest where “we are made of the same stuff as dreams”. So is this time the time of a man who learns to die under the gaze of the child he wants to be again? It is the circle of eternal return. Those who saw this as Oliveira’s lightest film did not see this circle, its gravity, its transcendence. Nor the “solitude”. (FF)