philip-davies31 How does that poor little girl survive the relentless instructional zeal of the feminist history professor? By growing up with a goody-goody tic that has programmed her to ask the questions her indoctrinator/mother expects her to ask at the appropriate intervals. Its like a litany, with the parent as priest catechizing the child, whose questions are (in truth) merely dutiful responses to this constant stream of dry facts. No normal child of that age could endure such a logorrheic bombardment for more than a few minutes. This child's normal impulses have been suppressed, and her personality subdued into the mere ideal creation of the parent, with no evident independent nature, and no surviving impulse to run off and make her own discoveries. The complete lack of the wonder and adventurous imagination of childhood in this film, in which after all a child features so extensively, is shocking. In the midst of the truly emetic bleatings and blurtings of the bored tour guides and their shambling charges, one begins to wonder if Oliveira is going to provide a corrective to this superficial version of civilization. And he does, amazing us with the depth of wisdom emanating from the table-talk of the autodidactic world travellers at the captain's table on the cruise the mother and child have joined. He obviously sets this well-travelled and curiously informed worldly experience against the mere prescribed academic book-learning and touristic rote-incantation of historical clichés. The stiffness and passive hostility of the mother's reaction to the captain's attempt to include her and her daughter in this select group is very telling. She suspects his motives, and resents his non-academic freedom with history and culture, and is shocked - as a rigidly self-sufficient modern woman - by his intuition that she and her child 'appear lonely.' This film presents a world-view entirely at odds with the sort of superficiality inculcated in society today. It is therefore a precious commodity indeed that Oliveira is bringing to us from his voyage of discovery. SPOILER ALERT: But the unexpectedly violent denouement scuppers this optimistic outcome: In the horror-frozen grimace of the captain as his face reflects the appalling disaster overtaking his entire world, we see, if not yet the end of civilization, then certainly the deep wound afflicting it after 9/11. And one is forced to reflect that the child's culture-blind rescue of the burka-clad doll she left behind, when the alarm for 'abandon ship' was sounded, is a symbol of that vulnerable innocence which the act of terror itself has killed. The bitter irony of a child's doll becoming inextricably involved in the terrible events which lead to the death of a mother and child chills us with the inescapable realisation that now we are safe nowhere. We have been violently awoken from the beautiful dream that was civilisation. A barbaric new age is upon us.

amyvela-lx sorry but this film is one of the worst i'v seen in European cinema. alright, it has all the clichés and canons of European civilisation, but simply plucking these cultural allusions from everywhere doesn't show any intelligence. moreover, these citations are the most stereotypical, the explanations (of the ruins, legends, etc) the most simplicist, repeating parrot-like the information one can usu find in primary-school text books. the multilingual conversation is amazingly superficial, setting up all these binaries of man-woman, east-west, love-hate. frankly this degree of intellect can be simply found in any street. the ending is quite atrociously suspect to racism, and certainly very stupidly eurocentric. probably the worst thing of the film is that it pretends to make some profound comments whilst it is at best a slap-stick piece of nonsense with a jerk in the last scene

MartinHafer 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.

aliasanythingyouwant 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.