Manoel de Oliveira 

France/Portugal
 

Benign, bespectacled, ninety-something Portuguese helming legend Oliveira returns to Cannes for the umpteenth time. Last year it was Journey to the Beginning of the World, Mastroianni's last screen performance. This year, the annual offering – they appear with the kind of regularity which is the envy of younger directors – is Anxiety, a triptych, shot in several Portuguese locations and in Madrid and using Oliveira's long-term crew, including producer Paulo Branco and lenser Renato Berta, working on his 14th Oliveira pic.

Originally, the film was to be based around a Prista Monteiro play, The Immortals, but Oliveira realised the result would be "much too short". He then, as he puts it, "remembered" two other works which "I had been longing to adapt and which I had not adapted because they were too short" – an Antonio Patricio story called Suzy and an Agustina Bessa-Luis work, The Mother of the River. "I gave this triptych the title Anxiety," Oliveira explains, "because it occurred to me that there was cause of anxiety, to a greater or lesser extent, in each."

The three basic stories are easily summarised: less so the hypnotic, languid, detail-driven air with which they are recounted. The first, based on The Immortals, is about an aging father and son, each famous: the father watches the son's descent into senility and attempts to drive him to suicide. The second – with the Patricio story behind it – begins in a theatre in 1930's Oporto. Courtesan Suzy, undergoing a dangerous operation, has to prove her resilience. The third story is told in flashback, as recounted to Suzy's inconsolable lover. It is the consolatory fable of Fisalin, a country girl who discovers that her fingers are made of gold.

All of which should make it clear that Oliveira is still far from getting on the phone to Pamela Anderson. The film is the typically dense, Oliveiran blend of the real and the magical, packed with allusion and shot through with the kind of philosophical enquiry which makes for cult viewing. Watching an Oliveira film means being the object of a personal vision which is pretty well uncontaminated by commercial considerations – an experience with which contemporary audiences – (if they are not Portuguese) find unfamiliar, both thematically and formally. Such unfamiliarity might not always be comfortable, but, if you are prepared to make an attempt to connect with the unique spirit of his work, to imaginatively ride with the dialogues, you might actually learn something – or at least learn to look at the medium of film in a slightly different way.

Oliveira's work – not least in Portugal, where insiders speak of his all-embracing, detrimental influence on younger directors in a country which is fond of the sprightliness of Pedro Almodovar, and which is crying out for a Pedro of its own – is almost legendary for its 'difficulty'. Crowd-pleasing devices such as stable character, suspense and swift pacing are abandoned in pursuit of a higher aim – that of using cinema as a way of creating art: Oliveira is capable of single takes which are longer than most people would spend in front of a painting. Sales agents and distributors would baulk at this kind of stuff were Oliveira 70 years younger: it is the kind of work to which the adjectives 'intellectual' and 'elitist' can too easily be applied. But the man is a legend, a survivor from the silent era and a contemporary of Eisenstein, and his work does attract small but entirely faithful audiences, both abroad and at home.

In Portugal, Oliveira's Aniki-bobo – made in 1942, and distinctively Italian neo-realist in style – is still considered the classic. His 90s work includes The Convent (1995) and Party (1996), starring Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli respectively, which shows the immense esteem in which he is held abroad. 

The new film does not have the same star appeal, but anxiety-ridden reviewers can take comfort from the fact that they will have three short films to write about rather than one long one. Jonathan Holland