If I make it to see 93, my greatest wish is that I’ll still maintain over my bladder and sphincter.  Concern over whether I have command over my craft will be as far from my mind as memories of eating solid food.  For Manoel de Oliveira, the four-time Cannes winning nonagenarian from Portugal, age is much more of an inspiration than it is an obstacle.  He’s been making films before they became “talkies,” and in 1985, received a special lifetime achievement award from the Venice Film Festival, an honor generally bestowed on people with one foot in the grave.  Oliveira has won three more awards from Venice since then.

Much like last year’s Faithless, in which an Ingmar Bergman script was brought to life by an actor (Erland Josephson) who has played Bergman’s screen alter ego a number of times, Oliveira’s new I’m Going Home, features a lead performance by Michel Piccoli, who has appeared in a handful of the writer-director’s films in roles we can only assume are loosely meant to be Oliveira.  Here, Piccoli plays Gilbert Valence, a very popular but rapidly aging stage star in end of the millennium Paris.  When Home opens, he’s performing in Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King as the titular ruler who is going absolutely insane over the end of his reign.  It’s not exactly subtle, and the fact that the first 15 minutes of Home is basically a filmed version of the play comes off as a bit weird and clunky (especially for a 90-minute film – if you stumble into the theatre late, you might think you’re in the wrong cinema).

The instant Valence leaves the stage after his performance, he is told his wife, daughter and son-in-law have been killed in a car accident.  Flash to “some years later,” where Valence has only a young grandson (Jean Koeltgen) to call family, and roles are becoming increasingly difficult to find.  His agent (Antoine Chappey) tries to push a high-paying television part, but Valence wants nothing to do with that medium.  After briefly appearing as Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Valence is given a big opportunity:  American director John Crawford (John Malkovich, in his second straight role as a director following Shadow of the Vampire) is about to being filming James Joyce’s Ulysses.  The actor who was to play Buck Mulligan has backed out, and Crawford wants to replace him with Valence, who would have just three days to learn the film’s difficult English dialogue.

There are three scenes that really stand out in Home, the first showing a pair of young fans approaching Valence to ask him for his autograph while he’s window shopping.  This exquisite scene is shot through a storefront window, which deprives it of unneeded dialogue.  The second, much more of an interesting metaphor, depicts the usually reflective Valence deciding to buy a pair of shoes.  “I’m constantly in someone else’s shoes,” he says, referring to his career of portraying other people.  Home’s final shot, which I won’t reveal here, will break your heart.

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