There aren't many "confessions" in Manoel de Oliveira's autobigraphical essay film, Visit, or Memories and Confessions. The Portuguese film director is too obviously pleased with himself to confess any transgressions, although his wife, Marie Isabel, seems a bit mournful and admits, in highly elevated language, that being the spouse of a famous director is not exactly a picnic Sunday in the park. (Oliveira's remarks on his relationship with his actresses, who embody for him the essence of the feminine and in whom he acknowledges becoming entangling, signify what might be part of the problem.) The film does contain a "visit", that is, an invasion of Oliveira's fantastically tasteful and well-appointed house by an unnamed man and woman, a loquacious pair who quibble about philosophy, and just might be at the wrong address. And plenty of memories are on display, in the form of old pictures and home movies projected directly at the viewer. At first, one expects the picture to be modestly proportioned and slight, even whimsical -- but, Visit turns out to be no such thing; in fact, the film is wildly ambitious and encyclopedic, an account of Oliveira's aesthetics and a narrative of Portugal's history from the late nineteenth century to 1981 when it was made. (Oliveira lived to be 106 and continued to make movies long after he had passed his centenary -- he died in 2015. At the time the movie was made, apparently financed by the Portuguese Center for Film Arts, the director was 73. The film wasn't released, however, until May, 2015, posthumously: one month after his death in April 2015,)
A man and woman, whom we never see except indistinctly very late in the film, are searching for a house that the woman has glimpsed once, but only at night and by the light of a single window illumined on the second story. They approach Oliveira's gorgeous home, an ivy covered manse surrounded by ancient trees, and, after discussing some of the trees (imagined as guardians to the home), they find the door open and so, not without reservations, saunter into the place. The interior is full of splendid objets d' art, thousands of old photographs, elaborate furniture and potted plants, and labyrinthine passages. The man and woman tour the place, the woman, at least, nervous about being apprehended by the owner, a person that they seem not to know. During their tour, which is interrupted by monologues by Oliveira, the man and woman venture highly poetic and philosophical observations -- for instance, at one point, the woman says the "house is the world" and the man replies "therefore it is a ship". (Oliveira is interested in Camoes and the seafaring adventures of the Portuguese such as Magellan and Vasco de Gama..) They discuss a magnolia tree outside the front door. The couple spend the entire day in the house. At twilight, the man says that this hour "is when we forget the spirit of revenge." The woman agrees that this is fine thing. The man notes that it would be better to have no "spirit of revenge" to forget in the first place. Near the end of the film, it is dark and we see the man and woman from the rear, shadowy indistinct figures, walking down the lane away from the house in the gloom. Sometimes, the woman suggests that there is a presence in the house, that it may be haunted in some way -- and, in fact, there is a ghost in the house, Manoel de Oliveira, typing away in an upstairs study on a "treatment" for his new film, a picture about Portuguese history.
About two-thirds of the film consists of Oliveira talking directly to the camera, once again in ultra-literate, highly abstract terms. His subjects include Portuguese history, his theories about film making, tributes to his long-suffering wife, and family chronicles stretching back to the days of his grandfather. The whole enterprise has a feeling of foreboding and doom -- Oliveira tells us that he has lost the house, apparently by mortgage foreclosure, and that it has been sold to someone else, necessitating that he vacate the place where he has lived for forty years. (Hence, I think, the notion of the "spirit of revenge" that afficts the otherwise equable director.) Oliveira claims to be apolitical, probably a necessity given Portugal's vexed history, but recounts how he was arrested and interrogated aggressively, not tortured but questioned just to the point of torture, in 1960. He talks about the April 25 revolution, an uprising that displaced the Fascists, apparently, but led to Oliveira's financial ruin -- no one would loan him money and so he has lost the house, although this situation is complex: the property is adjacent to the family factory that once made "haberdashery" and this place has fallen into ruin although Oliveira still owes money on its enterprises; it's for this reason that the mortgage has been foreclosed on the home. Oliveira shows home movies of himself as a child, playing with his siblings, and, then, films of his own children riding bicycles on the estate. Early in his first monologue, Olveira says that he's "sacrificed everything to make movies" -- this doesn't seem even remotely true on the basis of the tour conducted by the man and woman. (In fact, a theme of the movie is that the man and woman can see and observe things in the house, seemingly, invisible to Oliveira who is blinded to such insights by his familiarity with the place. Certainly, the home is exemplary: the woman notes that there's not a trace of dust anywhere, the thousands of framed pictures are all glistening under glass, and we don't see any garbage bags or towels on the floor -- the bathroom has a marble bathtub, but the toilet isn't shown.) Like the man and woman's essay-like speculations, Oliveira's remarks are highly rarefied, abstract, and, even, metaphysical. He discusses his faith in God or the Absolute as he calls it and describes his cinematic work as "the pursuit of virginity or sanctity" -- that is, an approach to the Divine. (He says this is particularly true of what he calls his "tetralogy of thwarted love", films that he made in the seventies.) Much of what he tells us is hard to understand and, unless you are student of recent Portuguese history, many of the picture's historical references will fall on deaf ears -- I barely know what "April 25" means, and, then, only from Pedro Costas' short film in Historico Centro. Except for Pessoa, none of the names that he mentions mean anything to me and Oliveira, further, complicates his monologue by using many acronyms that mean nothing to someone not conversant with Portuguese politics and institutions) Oliveira muses on his father who was an idealist and dreamer -- he built an important hydroelectric plant. He shows us an irrigation ditch that has turned into a sixty foot high waterfall and provides with an account of some of his family's rural and agricultural property; he talks about deaths that he has witnessed and gives up a brief tour of Portugal's one and only film studio, noting that everything shot in a movie studio is by definition unreal and, therefore, because "artificial more real." His wife, whom we have seen in innumerable pictures and who appears in the home movies, is shown in her garden, which seems vast, clipping red flowers. Oliveira's discourse about film-making is like remarks by Godard or Tarkovsky -- most of the time, it is all metaphysical gobbledygook and impossible to understand. Like Tarkovsky, Olveira acts as if film's are the product of the pure Will and that moviemaking is a metaphysical endeavor with angelic feet that never come close to touching the ground. (This is despite the fact that Oliveira's films to the extent that I have seen them are intensely grounded in physical reality -- The Strange Case of Angelica contains detailed, documentary-like viniculture scenes and, even, the director's last feature film, Gebo and his Shadow, is noteworthy mostly for the impassive, stony sets in which the action takes place, rooms that look as if they were hewn out of raw granite.) The movie ends with Oliveira speculating on the role of tiny Portugal in world history. By this time, Oliveira has thoroughly equated himself with his country and its history. We see a picture of him as a small child with long hair and wearing a dress and, then, the picture shrinks into the darkness of the universe and we hear the clatter of an old projector dragging a film lead through its sprockets.
I don't think I understood the picture fully and it's far too recondite for me to recommend for any one other than fans of this director. But, on its own terms, the film is successful and worth seeing if you have an interest in Oliveira and his extravagant amour propre.
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