A Talking Picture: Those Who Ignore History....

The following review was originally posted on cinekklesia on June 22, 2005.

If somewhere deep within your psyche, you have a yearning for PBS documentaries, particularly about history and geography, then Manoel de Oliveira's A Talking Picture (2003) is the film for you. Or, if you have an inexplicable desire to eavesdrop on long conversations between elite European women—with topics ranging from linguistics to the EU to the current state of Arab civilization—then this, too, is your film.

Originally titled Um Filme Falado, this Portuguese movie's first half focuses on the characters of Rosa Maria (Leonor Silveira), a historian at the University of Lisbon, and her seven-year-old daughter, Maria Joana (Filipa de Almeida). Both of them embark on a long cruise in the summer of 2001 from Portugal to Bombay, where Rosa's husband is stationed as an airline pilot. Rather than fly to India, Rosa decides to take the scenic route so that she can witness first-hand all of the sites that she has encountered solely in books.

The travelogue becomes an encyclopedic exercise as Rosa answers the very simple questions of her daughter ("What's a legend?" "Who are Muslims?"). We also get to hear trivia tidbits regarding such famous tourist sites as Greece's Parthenon and Egypt's Great Pyramids. The PBS-like feel is accentuated when Rosa and Maria encounter helpful locals and tour guides along the way, characters who provide them a wealth of supplementary information. This reminds me of the contrived "conversations" that one so often encounters in documentaries ("So, Mr. Docent, how did the Parthenon originally appear to the Ancient Greeks?").

Thus, a viewer has to enter A Talking Picture prepared for a lot of didactic information. There is no passive viewing here: you're going to "learn something," whether you want to or not. If you have bad memories of the day when your high school history teacher was absent and the substitute (probably the football coach) made you watch a documentary for the entire class period, then you might want to avoid this film.

The focus of the second half shifts from Rosa and Maria to three other passengers on the cruise: Delfina, Francesca, and Helena (Catherine Deneuve, Stefania Sandrelli, and Irene Papas, respectively). These three characters are famous women at the top of their fields (business, modeling, and singing), and their fame grants them a seat at the table of the ship's American captain, John Walesa (John Malkovich).

As mentioned earlier, the three women (+ captain) discuss a variety of contemporary topics. What makes their experience surreal is the fact that each person is speaking in his/her own language: English, French, Greek, and Italian. They all understand each other perfectly and for the most part, feel no need to translate or to speak in a language apart from their own. Until the viewer gets used to the conversational dynamic, he/she may feel disjointed and confused. It is like witnessing Douglas Adams' vision of the Babel fish enacted in our own time.

So how do these plots intersect? On a subsequent evening, the captain, who has taken an interest in Rosa Maria and Maria Joana, invites our initial two protagonists to his table, where Delfina, Francesca, and Helena have become regulars. Upon doing so, the conversational dynamic changes: none of the three elite women understand Portuguese, and so they all must revert to English, today's Lingua Franca.

What is Manoel de Oliveira trying to say here? Is he possibly making a comment about his native country? Does he feel that Portugal, once a dominant colonial power, has become a marginal part of the European project, an outpost on the western tip of the continent? In her role as historian, Rosa Maria has studied the other women's languages, but they appear not to have granted her tongue the same courtesy.

More broadly, is de Oliveira making a comment about the marginalization of history from the European conversation? Throughout her tour, Rosa Maria demonstrates a breadth of cultural understanding that seems to elude the three elite women. While the latter are not oafish or uninformed in their views of the world, they seem to lack the nuance and sensitivity that grace our historian's perspective.

One suspects that de Oliveira's casting decisions consciously or unconsciously sought to reflect the above dichotomy. The historian is a relatively young woman, while the three elites are middle aged and past their prime. The historian, of all people, is shown exuding youth, vitality, and intellectual curiosity, qualities that seem to elude the more powerful, yet ossified, arbiters of the European status quo.

Where does the United States fit into all of this? If John Walesa represents the American voice, then the U.S. comes off as a puzzling creature. On the one hand, "America" is the captain of this global ship, steering the world by its sheer size and might. However, Malkovich portrays Walesa as slightly clueless; even though he can understand his European passengers on a conversational level, he appears to remain outside of their mentalité, not fully understanding them on a cultural and psychological level. He is like a prop: the passengers will interact with him because he has administrative authority, but ultimately, his only purpose is to steer the ship; nobody wants to develop an actual relationship with him.

So what does de Oliveira want us to learn from his exercise in didactic conversation? Oddly enough, the DVD jacket does a good job of sizing up A Talking Picture on a thematic level: it is an intersection (clash?) between history and contemporary events. As the final scene makes clear, it is not by coincidence that this movie takes place just a couple of months prior to 9/11. Oliveira seems to castigate European elites for not developing a more in-depth, nuanced view of history and the so-called "Clash of Civilizations" between Western and non-Western cultures. He also appears to fault the U.S. for steering the global ship blindly, ignorant of what the world thinks of it and its policies.

In terms of portraying "Big Themes" surrounding European culture, identity, and politics, A Talking Picture is not nearly as powerful and aesthetically captivating as Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors" trilogy—Blue, White, and Red—which floored me when I first saw them ten years ago. However, A Talking Picture is a worthy comment on our times, if you're willing to sit through the fact-heavy travelogue. If nothing else, you'll be prepared for your next round of Trivial Pursuit!