Christopher Columbus, The Enigma

Like Jia Zhang-ke's recent Still Life, Manoel de Oliveira's new Christopher Columbus -- The Enigma parallels a foreground story of personal changes and losses with a background one: how all has been lost to history. But unlike Still Life, whose parallel is mere cleverness, Enigma doesn't neatly, reductively make either foreground or background simply about physical things that have disappeared (lovers, dams), but makes the more melancholy--and substantially less melodramatic--case that everything still lives on, just older and less vital, mementos of power and romantic exploration turned museum pieces. It's cheeky and eccentric: most of the film consists of possibly dubious and certainly forgettable history lessons about how Christopher Columbus was probably the Portuguese man Christopher Colon, delivered by a husband-wife team as they spend 50 years together on their own quest from one historical sight to another to examine the evidence. Eventually, they turn into Manoel de Oliveira and his wife (above). Along the way traffic lights are compared to the flag of the republic, a guardian angel of the republic repeatedly peeks at them in the background, and, in one of the great scenes of the year, the old couple on a tourist boat in the New York harbor have a long, hesitant conversation in which they fail to figure out why they still love each other.

A film about voyagers tracking the origins of the most famous voyager of all, Enigma nearly opens with the young Manoel de Silva arriving in America via ship in the '40s, as all of New York lies under clouds of fog, revealing only a few gauzy lights, and ends with a cruise ship on the horizon. As usual with Oliveira, allegories seem to be afoot. In the '40s, at least, there is still exploring to be done in a mysterious and foggy world; now, though Columbus's origins remain unknown, and its fate looks both imminent and uncertain, the world is known and questing is the domain of Holland-American, Carnival, and the Princess lines. History is everywhere but through--the guardian angel smiles on but is impotent, and it's all the intrepid couple can do to nostalgically attempt and fail to decipher the past. At least, Oliveira seems to be saying, the past has mystery--and somewhere to go. Like most of Oliveira's recent films, Enigma is so lucid and upfront that even in its matter-of-factness it refocuses attention on easily ignored percepts of everyday life: clouds, seas, the sounds of walking. There's mystery for those who want it, but even while Oliveira and his wife strive and seek and find, the only possible search is research. It's an old man's film, and a great one. Like Still Life, perfectly composed, but unlike Still Life, shot on beautiful unmuddied film, Enigma proposes the past as lost in petrification, and yet the only viable place to go.