Description: Effortlessly gliding from graceful travelogue to playful star-driven caprice to trenchant cautionary fable, A TALKING PICTURE is "a majestic and profound work by one of the greatest of all living filmmakers" (Chicago Tribune). Writer-director Manoel de Oliveira (I'M GOING HOME, VOYAGE TO THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD) has created a valedictory cinematic masterpiece that balances timeless beauty with audacious theatricality in order to explore the fanciful myths and grim ironies that define Western Civilization at a millennial crossroads. In july of 2001, eight-year-old Maria Joana embarks on an ocean cruise from her native Portugal to Bombay, India accompanied by her mother, history professor Rosa Maria (Leonor Silveira). But as three mysterious and glamorous women, each played by a world-renowned film legend, board first at Marseilles (Catherine Deneuve - UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG), Naples (Bernardo Bertolucci muse Stefania Sandrelli) and Athens (Irene Papas - THE TROJAN WOMEN, ANTIGONE), their picturesque journey begins to grow in tension and complexity. When ship captain John Walesa (John Malkovich - BEING JOHN MALKOVICH) hosts a unique summit between these three international graces, the table is literally set to transform A TALKING PICTURE from a genial melancholic history lesson into an incendiary contemporary news flash. Deftly, lovingly and confidently crafting a film of subtle rhythms, deep conviction and shocking contrasts, 96 year old Manoel de Oliveira "appears unstoppable" (Boston Globe) and conclusively demonstrates he is "a master of the medium" (The New York Times). "With rare eloquence," A TALKING PICTURE "speaks to our hearts and minds about modern quandaries and eternal truths." (Chicago Tribune)
Good for about 25 minutes At the age of 93 (2003), Manoel De Oliveira decided to make a film that would offer the sensuality of travel, the beauty of mythology, the innocence of a child, and the heady intellectualism of a salon. The resulting film, A Talking Picture, is a tall order, even for a film director whose accomplishments span decades of writing, directing and producing.
In order to combine these broad stroke goals, Manoel De Oliveira created a conversation-filled film in which a beautiful history professor and her daughter travel by ship from Portugal to Bombay, stopping at historic sites. At each site she teachers her daughter, in a melodic, chimeric voice, about the past, how it ties to the present, in a language that is understandable to children of all ages. To infuse the salon, Oliveira throws in a sea captain (poorly cast with John Malkovitch) and three vibrant women, talking politics--personal and worldly, a la 'My dinner with Andre". To make it even more cosmopolitan, each character speaks in their own tongue.
With all that conversation, history and thought, why does this movie fail? The intellectual banter is too heady, incongruent, and dated, and John Malkovitch is downright creepy. The movie has no tempo, so there is no sense that we are going to actually learn anything.
What works: the sweetness of teaching the daughter about mythology, history, how the past intertwines withthe present. The beautiful backdrops of port of calls. If Oliveira had simply left this a sort of travelogue film it might have had a chance of working.
The film's first 20 minutes or so is worth watching. Enjoy that part and then shut down the DVD player.
A Big Disappointment The movie starts off as a very SLOW tour of famous places around the Mediterranean. A mother gives her daughter lessons about history and architecture at each port their cruise ship stops at. Then the focus changes to the ship captain's dining table, where he has invited a French woman, an Italian, and a Greek woman. Somehow, magically, they can all understand each other's languages. The captain seems to fancy himself quite the debonair ladies' man, but he is SO effeminate, that it's laughable. He was creepy, is what he was. This Malkovich is one LOUSY actor, or maybe it's just the stupid script lines he was given. The topper was the unbelievable ending. Due to some kind of bomb threat, the captain orders everyone to abandon ship. The little girl runs back to her room to reclaim a doll, then when she and her mother return to the deck, OH NO, the lifeboats have left them behind! (Wait, isn't the captain supposed to stay behind and be the last one to deboard???) So the "noble" captain stands up in the life boat and SLOWLY (did I say SLOWLY?) starts unbuttoning his jacket, making like he's gonna jump in the water to save them, all the while yelling at the two to JUMP, JUMP! All in all, a mind-numbing waste of time...
Incredibly bad movie! This movie can hardly even be called a movie. Watching it is basically like following a very serious boring history teacher around as she explains random facts from ancient history to her daughter during their vacation. Other people join in with the boring facts, such as a priest who explains in detail what they will see inside a ruin they are about to enter, "There will be a column on the left, blah, blah, blah." The only cute thing about the movie is the little girl who is also boringly serious but has a sweet face. In the last five minutes of the movie, the director for some reason changes the movie from slowest-documentary-style-fiction-on-earth to low-budget-horror-film. The cruise ship starts to sink, the mom and daughter don't make it on time to the one escape boat (yes, suddenly there are only 12 people on the ship instead of the hundreds we saw before), and they are blown up. I wouldn't normally tell you the ending but this is such a ridiculous ending, and so mean after you've watched this mom and daughter for the whole movie, that it must be exposed before you bother to watch it. You have to see this movie to believe how incredibly dumb it iS!
Double-Talking Picture Fortunately, this movie is so boring --at times rather childish without childlike charm--that not many viewers will stick it out to it's ridiculous end.
It is NOT educational as some reviewers claim. Historical "facts" about some of the places visited are, in fact, half-truths or outright distortions of historical evidence. For example, while viewing the pyramids in Egypt, we are told that they were built by Jewish slaves. If we Google "who built the pyramids," we see the absurdity of this assertion. The mass immigration of Jews to Egypt did not occur until a thousand years after the pyramids were built. The identity of the actual builders is difficult to ascertain, but the historical evidence that exists suggests that the workers--many of them willing and dedicated--were certainly not foreign or necessarily enslaved.
Interestingly enough, the the most emotional misstatement of the film again casts a bad light on the people native to the Middle East, the Arabs--Irene Pappas makes a peculiarly overwrought and out of context statement blaming the Arabs for burning the library of Alexandria. In fact, historians have blamed Christians or Romans for this tragedy as well as possibly Moslems...it could be all three, no one knows for sure.
In the midst of a pseudo philosophical conversation at the ship's captain's table, one of the women veers completely off the "topic" to deliver a bumper sticker explanation of "what's wrong" with the arabs.
At the end of the movie, all this gratis arab/moslem smashing makes sense. The weird (vaguely perverted) captain whispers to the gals at his table that bombs placed by arab terrorists have been found on the boat and asks them to stay seated until the announcement is made,at which time they are to walk calmly and slowly to the lifeboats.
The mother and child find themselves stranded on the exploding ship because the child ran back to their cabin to retrieve a little arab doll she promises to protect. THE MESSAGE:Get it?! Arabs are bad and only cause disaster for anyone who likes them. This is propaganda not drama, and clumsy, bigoted propaganda at that.
A great film by a great man... I am disappointed and quite annoyed that many dislike this film and other works by Manoel de Oliveira. This is a magnficient picture, one of Manoel's best, and it's really a deep, humanistic, and sad film about the current world situation and the world itself. The film is filled with beautiful shots, great dialogue, intelligence, charm, and thought provoking themes and culture, yet, most people (and many critics) intensely dislike this work. Perhaps after 2 decades of smug, aggressively cynical, "ironic", and arrogant attitudes in film and pop culture, people have suppressed their humanistic instincts, and that is the underlying reason that they cannot appreciate a film like this. It shows that people don't really change (a conclusion that this film comes to), and that we ignore history at our peril. We should be grateful that we have Manoel de Oliveira in our midst, a true treasure. He is 99 years old as of this writing (and is still making great films), and the fact that he is sharing his wisdom and sense of art with us should make us priviledged.
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