Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997)

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A road-trip pans out like an impromptu documentary, four passengers, Manoel (Mastroianni), an aging film director, two actors, Afonso (Gautier) and Judite (Silveira), plus the assistant Duarte (Dória), roving around a rural Portugal in a minivan. This is Portugal's national treasure Manoel de Oliveira's VOYAGE TO THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD, made when he was 89-year-old young. Sentiment prevails inexorably because this film is Marcello Mastroianni's swan song, posthumously released one year after his departure at the age of 72, instantaneously, his image, a stooped old man, assisted by a walking stick, can breach a cinephile's defense line and allow one to pour out oceanic compassion to an indwelt screen icon with an inward wail. Yet, Mastroianni isn't playing himself, he is the avatar of Mr. de Oliveira, therefore, his self-reflection on youth, senility and life itself, can be ambivalently stemmed from either Marcello or Manoel through their amassed life philosophy (notably, the poem of Pa. But the trip's de facto goal, is to set up a belatedly first meeting between Afonso and his paternal auntie Maria Afonso (de Castro). Born and raised entirely in France, and unequipped with his progenitor's mother tongue, Afonso embarks on the journey of discovering his biological root, to the place where his deceased father was born, with both trepidation and excitement. Here, countering the film's prior conversation-piece laden perambulation, Manoel leavens the drama with concentrated efficacy through Maria Afonso's initial cynical grumble (the legendary Portuguese actress Isabel de Castro furnishes the close-ups with searing potency), only to be thawed by an underlined consanguineous relation that transcends all the words. Spasmodically enhancing the vignettes (often in the tailgate shots facing the road they have merely traversed) is an eerie, eclectic soundscape confected by Emmanuel Nuñes, ranging from jangling to surreal, VOYAGE TO THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD, like its title indicates, is a humane travelogue to a corner on the earth which is largely forgotten by the rest of the world, as if time freezes, the beginning remains to be disinterred.

A world is the radius of influence of an individual. Therefore, the beginning of a world is his birthplace or the location of his earliest memories. Quite opposite, the ends of a world are there where an individual has never been before, since Nothing creates fear. Thus, the beginning, but not the end belong to the world. Furthermore, it is strange that an area which has a beginning, but no end still has a center, although in our world as the sum of the milliards of worlds there were not many in history: Rome, Jerusalem, Peripignan. The first two centers are clearly declared by religious authority, while the latter off sprang a instantaneous dadaist intuition of Salvador Dali. Traveling from his birthplace in Catalugna to the South of France, he saw a cabbage head growing amidst the rails in the railway station of Perpignan. According to Dali, this cabbage head was the center or "head" (Ceu) of the world. It makes sense, that a world which is fixed only on one side of the time or a space axis can have infinitely many centers - as there are individuals namely and thus worlds. For an individual, however, who represents in his spiritual power the center of his world by himself, as Manoel De Oliveira doubtlessly does, it makes sense not to declare a certain point of the earth his center, but to go back to his beginnings in order to conciliate it there with the end of his personal world.

Subtle, nostalgic, lyrical poem about memory, death, images of a lost world and origins. A film about love as shadow of existence, about the small traces who gives sense of days and years, about nuances of past and the looks of recollections. It is the last movie of Mastroianni and this fact is a form of nimbus for all film. It is testimony of a splendid art to build a character, to polish his soul, to create the outline of ordinary miracles. It is a film about profound Portugal. About national roots in a huge Europe, about the power and the pressure of words and search. Bits of fado and dust of illusions. A travel to the sense of universe and a transformation of a actor. Some memories, some words in the language of father and a statue. The bones of a life and its trickle.

The title echoes Jules Verne and suggests science fiction, and this is exactly what we get as two filmmakers with very different backgrounds explore their Portuguese past with friends. There are no special effects or gimmicks, just actors and a car, but throughout we sense an entry into another dimension - by simply placing his camera in the back of a car, de Oliveira conflates past, present, future as our heroes go time travelling, journeying into a landscape alien and forgotten, another dimension guarded by a totem carrier, and encompassing history, mythology, literature and folklore.JOURNEY has many themes - the past, cinema, politics, modernity and tradition - but it is really about the difference between banal objectivity and magical subjectivity. For fans of Chris Marker and VERTIGO especially, take this adventure with only de Oliveira's irony to guide you.