‘I’m Going Home’ Embarks on a Simple Yet Complex Journey

The great Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira makes mischief as nimbly as he makes movies. A critical darling appreciated for his wit and intelligence, the director has a gift for pushing an audience to its limits, a puckish trait that can be felt, rather acutely, in the first minutes of “I’m Going Home.”

The deeply felt story of an actor coming to the end of a long personal run, the film opens with a nerve-testing excerpt from Eugene Ionesco’s 1962 play “Exit the King,” about a ruler whose empire withers into nothingness with his last breath. The 400-year-old king, Berenger the First, is anguishing about his impending demise: After generations of glory, during which he founded Paris and wrote tragedies under the name of Shakespeare, he has discovered that he has only the rest of the play in which to live. Death--along with regrets about the life not lived--troubles his mind, just as it will that of Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli), the actor playing the king, who that evening learns that his wife, daughter and son-in-law have died in a car accident, leaving him sole guardian of a young grandson (Jean Koeltgen).

Set in Paris, the story for “I’m Going Home” is simplicity itself. Gilbert takes in his grandson, continues to work and, after a short peace, realizes that his own end is near. That spells out what happens but doesn’t get at the elegiac how. How when Piccoli, the roguishly sexy husband from Godard’s “Contempt,” rolls his bass of a voice like thunder, like Zeus himself, he makes you forget the 76-year-old in front of your eyes, now plumped and stooped and nearly bald. How, when after a period of mourning, Gilbert reenters the bustle of Paris as if he were seeing the world for the first time, whether he’s admiring the elegant lines of a store mannequin’s head or the pair of handsome brogues that bring a new spring to his step. And, finally, painfully, how Gilbert, the distinguished actor of film and television (even lovely young things beg for his autograph), without a drop of sentimentalism, begins to play the role that all of us everywhere dread--his last.

The most belated of late bloomers, the 93-year-old De Oliveira made short films and documentaries, along with a feature for children, before directing his first feature for adults in 1972. He’s been on a roll ever since, directing a film for each year of the 1990s, many of which have screened at Cannes and have been critically acclaimed, primarily in Europe. “I’m Going Home” is one of only a handful of his features to secure release in this country, which says a great deal about the impoverished state of foreign-language film distribution here and our increasing intolerance of “difficult” movies.

De Oliveira’s work offers philosophical and narrative puzzles of varying degrees of obscurity. However beautifully shot and directed, his films can be tough to grasp in one sitting and remain doggedly unfashionable, belonging to a time when the educated classes were rooted in literature, rather than in pop culture. Two of his latest features, for instance, include a soporific biography about a 17th century Jesuit priest (“Word and Utopia”) and an eccentrically charming update of a 17th century French novel (“The Letter”), neither of which, lamentably, was released here.

“I’m Going Home” is by far the most approachable of the director’s recent films, with an emotional depth that’s true to life and a streamlined narrative that for long stretches barely contains a word. If it seems like a minor miracle that its septuagenarian star is young enough to be the nonagenarian filmmaker’s son, more incredible still are the clear-eyed boldness and quiet irony with which actor and director take on life’s urgent questions. Soon after Gilbert returns to the stage (notably in “The Tempest”), his close friend and agent, George (Antoine Chappey), attempts to sell him on a part in a television series.

After listening to the ludicrous plot synopsis (“There’s a lot of action,” the agent promises), Gilbert erupts in anger, roaring that he has a career and professional ethics to uphold. As with the rest of us, as with Ionesco’s dying king, perhaps even as with De Oliveira himself, the old actor wants to be the author of his own story. But life, fate, what have you has a way of wrecking even our best-laid plans, writing chapters for us that we never imagined for ourselves.

And so Gilbert takes one last job. Against his better instincts, the venerable French actor signs on with an American film director (a deliciously supercilious John Malkovich) to play the very Irish Buck Mulligan in what looks like the world’s worst adaptation of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” It’s a disaster, of course, by turns absurd, humiliating and utterly devastating. Enter Gilbert in a fright wig and glued-on mustache; exit the king once more. And yet as Samuel Beckett, one of De Oliveira’s inspirations, famously wrote, “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

It doesn’t get more complex than that or simpler; it’s also a pretty good way to sum up the beauty, the honesty and the hard emotional tug of De Oliveira’s work and of his worldview. If there’s a reason that “I’m Coming Home” finally feels more hopeful than its subject suggests it’s because, well, as its director gently lets us know, in the end--in ours as well as in Gilbert’s--the most important question isn’t how we die but how we live.

Unrated. Times guidelines: There’s some discussion of sex and death, but it’s all above the neck.

‘I’m Going Home’

Michel Piccoli...Gilbert Valence

John Malkovich...John Crawford

Antoine Chappey...George

Jean Koeltgen...Serge

Released by Milestone Film. Screenwriter and director Manoel de Oliveira. Producer Paulo Branco. Cinematographer Sabine Lancelin. Editor Valerie Loiseleux. Costumes Isabel Branco. Production designer Yves Fournier. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

Exclusively at Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.