Manoel de Oliveira

Dennis Lim on Manoel de Oliveira.

When referring to the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, it is now — and has been for some time — customary to affix the phrase "world's oldest active filmmaker." The operative word is "active." Oliveira, who turns 100 in December, has made at least one movie a year since 1990 (when he was 82). His late-career surge, a gratifyingly long goodbye, defies preconceptions of what an artist's twilight period should be. Oliveira's undaunted productivity is remarkable, as is the undimmed creative vigor of his films.

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Portuguese Cinema

Belle Toujours, written and directed by Manoel de Oliveira

Jeff Shannon reviews Belle Toujours directed by Manoel de Oliveira.

What do you get when the world's oldest working filmmaker pays homage to one of the most controversial films of the 1960s? In the case of "Belle Toujours," 98-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira's tip-of-the-hat "sequel" to Luis Buñuel's scandalous "Belle de Jour," you get a slight little curio that honors Buñuel while casting off most of what made "Belle de Jour" (in which a bourgeois newlywed becomes a prostitute) the art-house sensation of 1967.

We can only speculate about what the late, great Buñuel might have made of this gently incongruous tribute, in which the tantalizing ambiguities of "Belle de Jour" are exchanged for a comparatively transparent reunion, set (like Buñuel's film) in contemporary Paris. It's here that we find the gracefully aged M. Husson (Michel Piccoli, reprising his role from Buñuel's film) still obsessing over women, especially the much-different Severine (Bulle Ogier, in the role originated by Catherine Deneuve), whom he chases around Paris before tricking her into a candlelit dinner of one-sided nostalgia and cruel manipulation.

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Portuguese Cinema

John Lichfield previews Manoel de Oliveira's "Belle Toujours".

One of the great classics of erotic cinema for the thinking man - and woman - is revisited in a French-Portuguese movie released in France this week.

Belle Toujours, directed by Manoel de Oliveira, has two of the same principal characters as the Luis Bunuel movie, Belle de Jour, made in 1967. It is not a re-make, but an exploration of the memories, fantasies, frustrations and regrets of the same characters, 40 years later. (...)

In Belle de Jour, which was based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, Séverine is a young, beautiful and wealthy doctor's wife who becomes a prostitute during the day to exorcise her sexual fantasies. In the new movie, she is widowed and about the enter a convent. She agrees to a final meeting over dinner with Husson - a friend of her husband who had helped, and exploited her, in her secret life 40 years earlier. Belle Toujours has had enthusiastic reviews in the French press. The critic for Le Monde described it as a "pitiless examination" of "human perversity". (...)

In the new movie, which is expected to appear in Britain in the autumn, Husson spots Séverine again after many years, at a concert in Paris. He tries to arrange a meeting with her but she eludes him.

Finally, just before she enters a convent, she agrees to meet Husson to discuss what happened four decades before. Most of all, she wants him to answer a question which is still torturing her: did her husband know about her clandestine activities?

Sequels to movies are commonplace, but sequels whose action takes place four decades later are almost unknown.

Le Monde described the new movie as a tribute to Bunuel. It said that the Portuguese director, Manoel de Oliveira, had the same "taste for frustrated love and unsolved enigmas, for the secrets of virgin and profaned bodies".

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Portuguese Cinema

Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, has begun shooting his latest film, "Christopher Columbus: The Enigma,".

The film is based on the book "Cristóvão Colombo Era Português" (Columbus was Portuguese), by Manuel Luciano da Silva and Silvia Jorge da Silva, which claims that Columbus was born in a small town in Portugal's hinterland, called Cuba, in whose honor he named the island of Cuba.

The film will be shot in the U.S. and Portugal and it's premiere is scheduled for July in Washington.

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Portuguese Cinema