Manoel de Oliveira plays his film in three stages: the first part - a play, the second can be roughly defined as a silent film (with the behind the scenes read excerpts from Beckett works), but in the end the director brilliantly performs the same material of the avant-garde exercise. Surprisingly, a joke, repeated three times, each time everything sounds fresh and develops into an almost verbatim adaptation of the biblical "Book of Job" - a spectacular point in a parable about how hard to empathize with other people's misery, when you have your own.
Direction
Oliveira stages the same scene thrice, each version reinvented.
Writing
Beckett meets Job in a script that dares you to keep up.
Acting
Bulle Ogier navigates theatrical layers with exquisite precision.
Director
Manoel de Oliveira
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Oliveira was 78 when he made this, proving European art cinema's golden age never ended — it just got weirder and more Catholic.
The silent film middle section uses Beckett's actual texts as intertitles, making the audience read suffering instead of hearing it — a brutal formal joke about mediation itself.
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