Old Masters. - Cannes Review 2001 - movie review

Film Comment, July-August, 2001 by Manohla Dargis

After the girl leaves Taiwan for a visit to Paris, the boy begins adjusting clocks to her time zone even as his mother attempts to commune with her own phantom lover, her recently deceased husband. That's about it, plus Taiwan and Paris. Although the film has some of the offhand beauty and pinpricks of exquisite agony familiar from Tsai's previous work, nothing feels much at stake, neither the inner lives of the characters nor the director's own commitment to the film. There are lovely glimpses of everyday life (the girl soaking her Paris-battered feet is funny and true), as well as the everyday surrealism for which Tsai has such sympathy, but it's not enough. There may be heartbreak here -- the mother caressing the tank in which an enormous white fish sways like a ghost -- but as with the point of the film itself, it's heartbreak that's mostly implied rather than persuasively felt.

Deep feeling pervades both Shohei Imamura's and Manoel de Oliveira's latest features, though you'd be hardpressed to find such radically different films. The Imamura is a comedy about ridiculous love, the Oliveira is a tragedy about ridiculous fate, and both are remarkable. Written by Imamura, Motofumi Tomikaw, and Daisuke Tengan, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge traces the resurrection of a broken salaryman (poet of melancholy Koji Yakusho) through the love and lust of a good woman. The singular nature of this resuscitation of body and spirit is pure Imamura: when the woman reaches orgasm, she releases a literal flood that not only brings her lover to climax but waters her garden and refills the river, giving the fish shelter, the town its livelihood, and contemporary cinema one of its more delirious metaphors. (Talk about that oceanic feeling!) As with The Eel and Dr. Akagi, Imamura's new film shows a director less at the apex of his fevered genius than at that point when genius no longer needs proving. It's an effortlessness of storytelling and a mastery of the craft that bring to mind late Ford and Hawks.

Oliveira's I Want to Go Home (Vou Para Casa) is similarly the work of a master, and while modest in scale, it is also as perfect a film as one could hope for. Michel Piccoli, in a beautifully tender, unsentimental performance, plays Gilbert Valence, a theater actor whose idyll, personal and professional, ends when his wife, daughter, and son-in-law are killed in a car accident, de Oliveira, who wrote the spare screenplay as well, doesn't presume to let his own words speak for the man's grief. Rather, he opens the story with a prophetic passage from Ionesco's The King Is Dead (not surprisingly, The Tempest comes later), then lets Gilbert's sorrow find expression in scenes that are haunting in their quiet insistence on absolute aloneness. Slowly, slowly, Gilbert will re-enter the world of the living through the simplest human gestures -- he drinks coffee in a favorite cafe, buys a new pair of brogues, watches his only grandson through a bedroom window. But however joyful these quotidian moments, these little oases, something has radically changed; when his beautiful new shoes are stolen, it's clear Gilbert is no longer a man in step with this world.