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Voyage To The Beginning Of The World

1997, Movie, NR, 95 mins

Voyage To The Beginning Of The World: Review

VOYAGE TO THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD | JOURNEY TO THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD | VIAGEM AO PRINCIPIO DO MUNDO | VOYAGE AU DEBUT DU MONDE
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Sad but true: Marcello Mastroianni's swan song is a snore. This lumbering film by Portuguese auteur Manoel de Oliviera largely squanders Mastroanni's talent and the viewer's time. Manoel (Mastroianni) is an aging Portuguese movie director who long ago emigrated to France, but has returned to Portugal to make a film. He accompanies his star, a famous French actor named Afonso (Jean-Yves Gautier), who's also of Portuguese ancestry, on a trip to the village where Afonso's father was born and where Afonso's aunt Maria (Isabel de Castro) still lives. Also along for the ride are Afonso's costar Judite (Leonor Silveira) and Duarte (Diogo Doria), their translator and driver. Along the way, they run across a statue of a mysterious mustachioed man that causes Manoel to remember his own youth in Portugal. The unfortunate thing is that De Oliveira fails to offset this scenario's obvious drawback, namely that the characters spend more than half the movie's running time stuck in a car. The pace picks up a bit when the group finally reaches Maria's house, but only in a frustrating fashion. Maria is perplexed that her nephew doesn't speak Portuguese, and asks repeatedly why his father didn't teach him. Maria also tells Afonso that her brother was always headstrong and distant, facts of which he's already well aware. Afonso does finally break through his aunt's initial suspicion, and convinces her to take him to visit the family graves. There she lectures him on the destructiveness of war, and warns that the absence of continuity between generations will lead to the extinction of the traditional life she's led in this forgotten corner of the world. With its seemingly endless digressions and cryptic prattle, this is precisely the kind of film that gives movies with subtitles a bad name. leave a comment --Sandra Contreras
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