Homer: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man
Synopsis
An elderly writer is giving a wordwide lecture tour, accompanied by an attractive young woman. Like his fellow-writer Borges, and no doubt Homer too, René Kermadec is blind. As they travel from Rome to Madrid, from Seville to Zurich and from Paris to Munich, his companion Sibilla “explains” the outside world to him as she sees it through her eyes with their hunger for life. Sibilla loves René but she regularly cheats on him. How could the old man satisfy her body brimming with desire? In Spain, she falls in love with a young bullfighter whose vitality also captivates the writer. Their scandalous threesome shocks public opinion but affords the old man the consolation of an imaginary fatherhood and gives the young woman the pleasure of passion. A pleasure that doesn’t last long...
Credits
Director (1)
Actors (7)
Production and distribution (3)
- Executive Producer : Île Productions
- Foreign production companies : Gam Films, Amka Films
- French distribution : Eurozoom
Full credits (11)
- Executive Producer : Raymond Blumenthal
- Adaptation : Fabio Carpi
- Sound Recordist : Roberto Petrozzi
- Line Producer : Raymond Blumenthal
- Screenwriter : Fabio Carpi
- Director of Photography : Fabio Cianchetti
- Press Attachés (film) : Laurence Granec, Estelle Chailloux
- Editor : Bruno Sarandrea
- Production Designer : Carmelo Agate
- Costume designer : Silvana Carpi
- French distributor : Amel Lacombe
Media Gallery
Technical details
- Type : Feature film
- Genres : Fiction
- Production language : French
- Coproducer countries : Italy, Switzerland, France
- Original French-language productions : Unspecified
- Nationality : Minority French (Italy, Switzerland, France)
- Production year : 1998
- French release : 04/02/1998
- Runtime : 1 h 40 min
- Current status : Released
- Visa number : 90.632
- Visa issue date : 26/09/1997
- Approval : Yes
- Production formats : 35mm
- Color type : Color
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About
As the character of René was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, I spent a long time looking at photos of him: the way he held his body, his hands, the stick he always held in front of him, his hair in the wind, his dead eyes... But photos weren’t enough, so I observed how my blind friends live and react. I hereby thank them all for putting up with my rude staring. I used them as inspiration and tried to live as though I didn’t have the crucial sense of sight. I lived for three months in Borges’s night. It was a fascinating job for me.
Claude Rich
