The Play's the Thing

Like life itself, good movies sometimes change the subject on you in midparagraph. You think you're watching the story of an elderly man in mourning, buoying himself up against grief and then realize he's started to worry about younger women, who have such a distressing preference for younger men. Or you settle down to enjoy a satire about the movie business, only to figure out that most of its characters, though peculiar to Los Angeles, have little or nothing to do with filmmaking.

As you probably know by now, the not-quite-Hollywood story emerges in Full Frontal, written by Coleman Hough and directed by Steven Soderbergh. The elderly man's predicament is the subject of I'm Going Home, written and directed by Manoel de Oliveira. It's not just the coincidence of an August release that prompts me to put these films together. Although one is a high-art meditation by a nonagenarian Portuguese master, the other a sketchlike quickie by a pop-drenched American, both films express a fascination with playacting: its evasions and distortions, as well as its unforeseeable matchups with reality. Despite the difference in provenance, the two pictures also tell us something about the working conditions of today's more interesting filmmakers.

More on that later. Right now, I want to rush Michel Piccoli onto the scene, so I can tell you how he first appears in I'm Going Home: doddering at death's threshold and having the time of his life at it.

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