I’m Going Home

Gilbert Valence is seventy-six, a well-known stage actor living in Paris. One evening, coming off stage, he is told that his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law have been killed in a car crash. His small grandson is left. Gilbert tries to change nothing: the same table at the same café, the same shoes bought again, the work carrying on. Then the offers arrive: a glossy television series, and a last-minute substitution in an English-language adaptation of Ulysses. Each of them shows him something. Manoel de Oliveira directs, with Michel Piccoli as Gilbert and John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve in the cast. Ninety minutes. The director made it at ninety-two.