Portugal’s Manoel de Oliveira was 98 when he made this sparely beautiful tribute to Luis Buńuel’s 1967 classic Belle de Jour. He is now 100 and still going strong — the only working director who once made silent movies.

Michel Piccoli appears in one of his last parts as Henri, an old man visiting Paris who drinks whisky at a bar where prostitutes ogle him and a barman hears his story.

He is searching for Séverine — originally played by Catherine Deneuve but now by Bulle Ogier — whose secret he knows and needs to tell her: in her youth she had a masochistic sexual desire which caused her to betray the husband she loved with other men.

When the old reprobate finds her, she runs hastily away but finally agrees to have dinner alone with him in the suite of an expensive hotel. She is now a changed woman but has one question which he alone can answer. Did her much missed husband know of her escapades?
 
The film is quiet, beautifully shot, uses Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony as its music and contains superb performances from both Piccoli and Ogier. Oliveira is not to everyone’s taste, but this is one of his best, most resonant works, exactly right in its roughly hour-long length.

As an echo of the Buńuel masterwork, it could hardly be better in teasing out and expanding on its themes. Effortless artistry, in fact.