The film opens in a theater where Eugène Ionesco's Exit the King is staged. Gilbert Valence, playing the King on stage, is a distinguished actor of theater. In his dressing room he receives the shocking news that his wife, daughter, and son-in-law have been killed in a car accident, and he must bring up their little boy on his own. As time passes, Valence is apparently over his grief. He busies himself with his daily life in Paris and, with help from his housekeeper, looks after his 9-year-old grandson Serge. We see that he plays Prospero in a French language version of William Shakespeare's The Tempest. As a grand old man of the theater, he turns down well-paying roles in low-brow television productions. However, when an American filmmaker John Crawford urgently needs an actor to play young Irishman Buck Mulligan, in a film adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses to be shot in Paris (in English) in three days, he was pushed into accepting the role. The result of this obvious miscasting becomes apparent during the shoot, and Vance, sensing the language barrier, his ill-preparation and old age, finds himself saying "Je rentre à la maison" and leaving the film set.[2]
Anthony Quinn of The Independent wrote, "Always good to see Michel Piccoli...in Manoel de Oliveira's I'm Going Home he plays Valence, a grand old stage actor who has recently lost his family...Few cameras stare so intently at things as de Oliveira's, and the long excerpts he films from Ionesco and The Tempest are frankly de trop, but this patient detailing of an actor's life...has a fascination akin to watching a sun slowly disappear beneath the horizon."[5]
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