Un film parlé

This movie had elements I really liked but it looked like three different films thrown together. I really wish the writer and director had focused on one of them instead of making, what seemed like, three different movies.

The first portion is like a travelogue where a nice Portuguese history teacher takes her cute young daughter to see the sites in Egypt, Athens, and other ancient locales. This wasn't especially exciting, but the acting and style of these visits made them oddly compelling and sweet.

Then, abruptly, the scene switches to a table across from the mother and daughter on the ship. At the table are three famous and successful European women and the captain, John Malkovich. All speak their respective languages (Greek, Italian, English and French) but seem to understand each other. Their conversations, to me, seem rather philosophical and lack any real depth--as the characters talk about grand ideas but give little information about themselves. It reminded me a lot of the sort of conversations you might have heard in the French salons of the mid 18th century--interesting but after a while rather bland.

The third movie VERY VERY abruptly begins after the Portuguese lady and her daughter join the others at the captain's table. Within minutes, the boat is blown up by terrorists. All, but possibly the Portuguese lady and her kid, survive--what an abrupt and unnecessary downer! Overall, the acting is pretty good (though Malkovich doesn't seem at all like a real ship's captain) and the story has excellent PIECES--but the whole just isn't much fun to watch. I do understand that the film deliberately juxtaposes the mother/child and ancient civilizations (symbolizing the heights of civilization)with the Nihilistic terrorist attack. I understand, but don't particularly like this contrast.

I highly recommend this movie for anyone with an open mind and patience. My own enjoyment of it was further enhanced by my love of languages, zeal for seeking subtext, and boredom with conventional film clichés. If you're like me in this respect, I think you'll enjoy this film. If you're looking for a thrill ride or expect one of the standard narrative forms, you will not.

The film behaves like the sea it frequently depicts. Lilting, undulating, splashing, and crashing randomly on its poetically simple story line: a Portuguese woman and her daughter set out on a cruise to meet their husband/father in Bombay. Along the way, they stop in various cities and have conversations about the history of the places they're visiting.

At first viewing, the films seems like a mixture of luxuriously long shots of ships and waves, stilted conversations between wooden actors, random scenes with strange editing, and almost no musical score. But the more I think about the film, the more the subtle meanings haunt me. The film was not an "upper", but I can't help smiling when I think about it.

I think the point was this: Through its academic recitation of history, a mother's explanations to her child, and an unsettling dose of present day reality, this movie contextualizes life in a way no other film I know of does. Good and Evil brought full circle? The grand flaw of humanity laid bare? An excercise in audience-manipulation? Whichever: Very rewarding.

There are many opinions listed here about the film itself from technical or artistic points of view or about whether it is interesting or boring etc.. My reaction is not about any of that. I have serious problems with this film's naive Eurocentric point of view, which, seems to me, adds up to a very troublesome and dangerous crusader mentality that breaks the world into a 'civilized' 'West' and the 'uncivilized' Rest. Don't misunderstand me, the idea is certainly not put in these many words, the film does have a nice politically correct surface --but simply look a bit deeper below the surface to see the way Africa is referred to, the direct and indirect ways 'Arabs' are pictured (not to mention the deeply ignorant way in which a whole world of Islamic cultures and civilizations are grouped under this term 'Arab' at one point), or the way the notion of civilization, its origins and its trajectory is depicted, the way terrorism is understood or pictured, and one can keep listing. Had this film been made in 1920s, I would have had less of a surprise reaction to it, but I mean, come on, we are talking 2003!

Consider the following excerpt for example. This is out of a scene where three main characters (three women, a Greek, an Italian, and a French -Papas, Sandrelli, & Deneuve, respectively) are having dinner with the ship's captain, an American man (Malkovich). You judge for yourself.

(French): Greece is still the cradle of civilization, and will be as long as the world goes around.

(Greek): It's a civilization that's been forgotten

(French): And with it fraternity and human rights, and the Utopian ideals of the French Revolution

(Italian): Which the United States later adopted

(American): And has reinforced

(Italian): Yes, but they're also being forgotten, as is happening on other continents, like Europe, not to speak of Africa!

(Greek): No civilization lasts forever…That's how Alexander the Great saw it when, under the influence of Aristotle, he decided to found a universal library… But what I find most curious is the case of the Arabs, who, having spread Greek culture in Europe and beyond, were the ones to destroy it, burning all the books in the blindness of their religious fervor.

(Italian): The beginnings of fundamentalism, which is everywhere today…

(Greek): What haunts the Arab world nowadays is the development of the West, with its many technical advances and scientific progress. This creates religious prejudice, which is what divides us…

PS, I know I said I won't explain, but for anyone who still takes seriously the story that the library was made by Alexander and then burnt by the Arabs, why not take a look at this Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Library_of_Alexandria or better yet, at this article: http://www.bede.org.uk/Library2.htm

This is another Great film of 97year old Portuguese director Manoel De Oliveira (a legend!). It's incredible how this director still creative is... His stories are simple and deep. He demonstrates that with a low budget you can always do strong films, with good lines.

A mother takes her daughter to a cruise trip through Mediterranean Sea. She teaches her story and gets in touch with three European women and the ship's captain. Everyone speaks his own language... That's why it's a "Talking picture", a meeting among people of several cultures. The dialogue follow the everyday life. The film seems to be very calm and seems to tell simply a friendship story, until the final scene... Where we remain totally surprised.

A small, cultivated and poetic picture, from an European big director.

A Talking Picture winds through the Mediterranean world at the leisurely pace of a tourist, taking in the sights, basking in the glow of civilization and its glories. Its director, Manoel de Oliveira, is not concerned with incident, with plot - he's concerned with ideas, with conversation. His movie is not called A Talking Picture for nothing; it is full of talking, some worth listening to and some not. Most of the worthwhile verbiage comes from a character named Rosa Maria (Leonor Silveira), a Portuguese history professor on a cruise with her young daughter (Filipa de Almeida). The mother-and-daughter are de Oliveira's device for presenting his ideas - the daughter asks elementary questions and the mother answers them, and through this simple back-and-forth, occasionally joined by other characters, de Oliveira creates the educational narration to go with his slide-show of the important sites of the extended Mediterranean world - Pompeii, The Acropolis, St. Sophia's, the Pyramids. Or maybe educational isn't the right word. De Oliveira doesn't seem as interested in informing us as he is in reminding us. The film doesn't take on any more of a professorial air than Rosa Maria does; Rosa Maria doesn't make lofty pronouncements and neither does the movie. The director's purpose is to share his appreciation for the myths, the legends, the monuments of Western Civilization, and he does so with the right kind of humbleness. It's only as the film reaches its climax that we begin to realize how darkened by uncertainty, even foreboding, de Oliveira's view of things is.

The film veers away from its pleasing, leisurely travelogue structure in the later passages, focusing instead on a group of rich, famous women entertaining, and being entertained by, the (presumably) charming ship's captain, played by the smug John Malkovich. It's here that some of the movie's charm falls away and it begins smelling of pompousness: the rich women all sit around chattering about themselves, making political observations, acting as mouthpieces for de Oliveira. The movie's whole sense of space becomes strangled in the ship's dining room; the expansive Mediterranean vistas are replaced by simply staged shots of Malkovich, Catherine Deneuve, Irene Papas and the Italian actress Stefania Sandrelli all sitting at the table being very witty (at least they think they are). The picture is saved in the end by Papas, whose character sings a lovely old Greek folk song, a song whose sad, simple melody seems a perfect ode to the civilization whose passing de Oliveira already seems in the process of mourning. Forces are at work to destroy the world de Oliveira loves: it's suddenly announced that the ship has a bomb on it, planted by terrorists at the last port-of-call.

The movie only becomes allegorical in the end, a sort of miniature Ship of Fools (take out the Porterian psychodrama and that's what you're left with) where the multilingual, erudite characters represent civilization and the bomb the looming specter of fundamentalism. For much of its run the film is less thematically over-bearing, less spatially shrunken. In its best moments it is barely more than a Discovery Channel documentary, a tour of the significant historic sites of the Mediterranean, but created by someone with a genuine sense of history, a love of civilization and all it stands for, and the ability to view things not politically or even morally but with the sagely eye of one who has made their peace with humanity (de Oliveira is almost a hundred after all). It's irrelevant whether A Talking Picture is good cinema or not - certainly there are better-staged movies - for what matters is not the form but the tone, the sense of embracing. The film's charms are modest but they're there, and they have nothing to do with the playing out of some dramatic story (when forced to deal with plot de Oliveira seems almost embarrassed). They have to do with loving words, loving places, loving ideas, and doing so unabashedly yet humbly.