When a prestigious film director is knocking 90, you might expect him to be jetting from homage to tribute on the Festival circuit, or playing dodder-on-roles in other director's films. Portugal's biologically-remarkable Manoel de Oliveira, born in1908, is clearly an exception.
Party is the eighth feature film he has made in his ninth decade alone. You might expect Oliveira, who directed his first feature in 1941, to know one or two things about life. He has, indeed, achieved what could be a superior state: a sage irony, which mellows his often disquietening take on the imperfections of life.
Party turns on a party which, given Oliveira's customary line in contrariness, is anything but. To celebrate their tenth anniversary, a young couple, Rogerio and his resplendent wife Leonor, decide to hold a garden party at their beautiful family palace on the Azores. Among their guests are close friends, Irene (Irene Papas) and Michel (Michel Piccoli): she's a celebrated, if semi-retired Greek actress; he's a fading roué. Michel performs to role and courts Leonor, who appears to rise to his slightly moth-holed charm; both Irene, Michel's mistress, and Rogerio, seem to go along with the attempted seduction until a sudden storm breaks up the party.
Fade to five years later. Irene and Michel return to the Azores and are again invited to the same palace, if this time for dinner. Rogerio and Leonor's relationship has slipped into a trough of monotony. Leonor yearns for something different. Michel and Leonor resume their courtship. 'But the outcome,' says Oliveira, 'is not as expected.'
Party is a par-for-the-course production from Portugal's Paolo Branco, who has produced most of the recent Portuguese films to walk a world stage and carved out a unique position in Portugal as the leading distributorand exhibitor of European art-house films.
Based out of Madragoa Filmes in Lisbon and Gemini Films in Paris, he is a mover and shaker, ceaselessly shuttling. 'With production, distribution and marketing, I never know where I am,' he says.
But he knows what he's doing. Branco usually works with 'auteurs'. His prolific production portfolio - around 90 films, he can't remember exactly - over the last 15 years - includes features by numerous French directors, name Portuguese directors (especially Oliveira, with whom he has worked since the early 1980s), longtime friend Wim Wenders (whom he persuaded to go to Portugal to shoot A Lisbon Story), and a polyglot bevy of directors, again with strong creative personalities, such as Chilean emigré Raoul Ruiz and the Lithuanian Sharunas Bartas, both of whom has filsm showing at Cannes earlier this year.
Since his films are aimed squarely at the international art-house circuit, where the best marketing is a good review, Branco's (highly successful) strategy is to showcase them at high-profile festivals. Party has gone down this road.
It can be seen as a companion-piece to last year's The Convent. That film had another bored couple Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich installed in a Portuguese convent. There Oliveira concludes that life is governed by opposing forces, good and evil, and that humans are not capable of living without evil unless they are prepared to give up their worldly interests. 'An ordinary life,' he says 'must be nothing other than a life in which these two forces are evenly balanced.'
Party replaces good and evil by men and women. 'Without prejudice,' comments Oliveira, 'one thing is certain, the evidence is plain and the facts are incontrovertible: a latent conflict opposes all that is masculine and all that is feminine. Neither age nor experience can remedy this deplorable state of affairs.'
'But, if this conflict between men and women is unavoidable, it is also because wise nature has organised things in such a way as to disrupt the monotony of our existence. Monotony engenders boredom. Relations between the sexes need excitement and stimulus.' Fortunately, the octogenarian Oliveira is able to conclude an a slightly more optimistic note: 'As to the rest, if rest there is, perhaps we can call it love.' John Hopewell
Prod co: Madragoa Filmes (Lisbon), Gemini Films (Paris)
Prod: Paolo Branco
Dir/scr: Manoel de Oliveira
Ph: Renato Berta
Costumes: Isabel Branco
Cast: Michel Piccoli, Irene Papas, Leonor Silveira, Rogerio Samora
Running time: 90 mins
Int sales: Gemini Films
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