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A Talking Picture

2003, Movie, NR, 95 mins

A Talking Picture: Review

TALKING PICTURE, A | UM FILME FALADO
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Actor Michel Piccoli's masterful performance in Manoel de Oliveira's engaging I'M GOING HOME (2001) may have suggested that the nonagenarian Portuguese director had finally turned his attention to directing his actors, but it was misleading. This intermittently interesting symbolic tour through European history once again places ideas over aesthetics and technique. Lisbon University history professor Rosa Maria (Leonor Silveira) and her 7-year-old daughter, Maria Joana (Filipa de Almeida), plan to spend an upcoming holiday with Rosa Maria's husband, airline pilot Joao, in Bombay. Rather than fly from Portugal to India, Rosa Maria decides to reenact the age-old Portuguese dream of finding an all-water route to the East by treating herself and Maria Joana to a cruise across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and into the Indian Ocean. Rosa Maria will finally see all the historic places she's only read about in books, while her preternaturally curious daughter will get a crash course in Western Civilization. At each port of call, Maria Joana asks her mother thematically relevant questions like "What's civilization?", giving her mother the convenient opportunity to speak abstractly about the nature of history, Portugal's often brutal incursions into Africa and the East, and the ways nations are forged from the crucible of conflict. Along the way, three beautiful women join the cruise: powerful French businesswoman Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) boards at Marseilles; Italian ex-model Francesca (Stefania Sandrelli), embarks at Naples; and in Athens, the very cradle of civilization, the famous Greek actress, Elena (Irene Papas), joins the other passengers. The women are all invited to join their Polish-American captain, John Walesa (John Malkovich), at his table for dinner, where, each speaking their own native tongue, they discuss the future of the European Union, the fate of the Greeks and how language can unite diverse peoples. This intellectual idyll is, however, rudely interrupted by the real world after a brief stop in Yemen, when a deadly threat to this microcosm of society is smuggled aboard the ship. The acting ranges from good — it's always nice to see Papas — to embarrassingly uncertain: a prissy Malkovich appears to be particularly uncomfortable and ill-prepared. Making matters even worse, Oliveira's usually erudite point of view seems badly dated. Shocked that her captain would mistake her for a women's libber, the glamorous Delphine challenges him with a tart "Do I look like a feminist?" And there's something so pat about Elena's precis of what's wrong with much of the Arab world — jealousy, mostly — that it can hardly be taken seriously. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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