O Gebo e a Sombra (2012)
Director: Manoel de Oliveira
Country: Portugal
Runtime: 95 min
Despite his age and general weariness, Gebo keeps on working as an
accountant to provide for his family. He lives with his wife, Doroteia,
and his daughter-in-law, Sofia, but it is the absence of João, son and
husband, that worries them. Gebo seems to be hiding something,
especially to Doroteia, who is anxiously waiting to see her son again.
Sofia is also waiting for her husband to come home, and yet she fears
him. All of a sudden, João arrives and everything changes.
by Kenji Fujishima
The specter of death haunts nearly every dimly lit frame and extended
take of Gebo and the Shadow, the latest film from the 104-year-old
Manoel de Oliveira, and a work that, for once, could be said to reflect
his age. That's hardly meant as a slight. Though the film is dominated
by fixed-camera setups within one set, more or less, the Portuguese
auteur's minimalist style, rather than seeming tired, ultimately meshes
beautifully with the story's world-weary, reflective substance.
An adaptation of a stage play by the Portuguese modernist Raul Brandão,
Gebo and the Shadow details a family on the verge of a long-time-coming
collapse. Delusions run rampant among the clan members. Most notably,
the titular patriarch (Michael Lonsdale) insists on keeping his wife
Doroteia's (Claudia Cardinale) hopes for the return of their fugitive
son, João, alive, to the point of pretending that he's seen him even
though he actually hasn't in many years—a long-running charade
reluctantly maintained by their servant, and João's wife, Sofia (De
Oliveira regular Leonor Silveira). And then, João (Ricardo Trêpa,
another De Oliveira regular) suddenly reappears—and rather than bringing
about an end to family tensions, his return merely exacerbates them as
his presence exposes even deeper fissures: the family's sheltered lives
versus João's hard experience, an insistence on maintaining an
increasingly outdated value system, and so on. At one point, a couple of
their friends, Chamiço (Luís Miguel Cintra) and Candidinha (Jeanne
Moreau), show up, and, in a moment that recalls a similar seemingly
throwaway conversation in The Strange Case of Angelica, one of them
pontificates about the consolation he finds in art in an increasingly
"tasteless" society.
Brandão isn't especially subtle about his themes, and one could
criticize the film for essentially offering mouthpieces for various
points of view rather than fully fleshed human beings, however
beautifully this particular cast of cinematic legends delivers their
lines. In a sense, then, we're always aware that we're watching a "stage
play"—and De Oliveira intensifies that feeling by basically refusing to
open out the play in any way. Other than a couple of outdoor scenes,
the majority of the film's action takes place in that one cottage; with
De Oliveira sticking steadfastly to an aesthetic of stationary camera
setups and long takes, the audience is put in the position of feeling as
if its watching a filmed theatrical performance more than anything
else.
But De Oliveira's style is hardly a mere stylistic affectation. Instead,
a profound sense of stillness comes across in Gebo and the Shadow; we
not only hear characters talking about their dead-end lives, but we also
begin to feel that inertia in our bones. To that feeling of deadening
stasis, Renato Berta's beautifully detailed, Goya-esque cinematography
adds a sense of impending death hovering above these characters: Dark
hues predominate, with candlelight providing the only sources of
illumination in the gloomy decor. (One could conceivably think of this
film as a kind of still life with humans.)
All of this might make the film sound like an impossibly bleak and
austere experience, whatever its incidental visual and temporal
beauties. And yet, the longer we stay with these characters, the more
the film begins to come across as an extremely deadpan comedy about
people resistant to change beyond all rational reasoning. "Happiness is
nothing ever happening," the remarkably passive Gebo at one point says.
Maybe it's fitting, then, that, when something truly dramatic does
finally occur in his life and he's thus forced to make an honest-to-God
decision, De Oliveira presents the outcome as a kind of ironic triumph,
complete with outdoor light finally entering into this darkly lit
purgatory.
Director: Shane Carruth
