Film Information

The first scene in Manoel de Oliveira’s A TALKING PICTURE depicts Rosa Maria (Leonor Silveira), a young history professor, and her seven-year-old daughter Maria Joana (Filipa de Almeida) on a bucolic cruise through the Mediterranean Sea. Rosa’s purpose for this trip is twofold: to join her husband in Bombay, India, for a family vacation, and to acquire first-hand knowledge of -- and introduce her daughter to -- historical sites at the various cities along their journey.

Starting in their homeland Portugal and moving through Marseilles (France), the ruins of Pompeii (Italy), Ceuta (Spanish Morocco), Athens (Greece), the pyramids of Egypt and Istanbul (Turkey), Rosa narrates to her young daughter some of the most important events in Western history -- sometimes struggling to separate myths and speculations from concrete marks of irrefutable histories.

On the cruise, Rosa and Maria eventually befriend three famous women of different nationalities: a renowned French executive (Catherine Deneuve), a former Italian model (Stefania Sandrelli) and a celebrity Greek actress (Irene Papas). Dining with the ship’s captain (John Malkovich), an American of Polish origin, all four passengers exchange pieces of their past while talking about the legacies of Western history –– each speaking in his or her native languages.

But the curious tourists are forced to stop discussing the rhetoric of tradition and history when a strange threat disturbs the cruise, menacing the ship and the life of all of its passengers.

"What begins as a history lesson between a mother and her daughter on a cruise ship turns into something a lot more fanciful…The 95-year-old director appears unstoppable." - Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe

"A Talking Picture is one of those great late works in which a master dares to put aside aesthetic concerns and his own ego..." - Amy Taubin, Film Comment

"In its own eccentric way, A Talking Picture is sublime...It has the air of remote, classical literature notionally and rather reluctantly transposed to a modern, cinematic setting...Malkovich gives an absolutely extraordinary performance as the cruise-ship commander in dazzling white uniform, drawling bonmots with Catherine Deneuve at the captain's table...The whole thing ends with a melodramatic flourish which sent me into a kind of clinical shock ..." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (UK)

"The feeling of participating in a time of decadence is the subject of Manoel de Oliveira's latest opus...Open to the sounds of what's going on in the world, Oliveira sees this end as the coming together of a cycle which will regenerate differently and in forms we don't know...A Talking Picture leaves the spectator dumbfounded, thrown from the cinema by a radical ending which leaves little space for idealism." - Didier Peron, Liberation (France)

"Simply ingenious...Starts as a history lesson, followed by tones of sophisticated comedy and finishes as a drama..." - Roberto Nepoti, La Republica (Italy)

"A testament to the fifth Rome, the utopia of the community of nations, comprising today's Europe...Oliveira is an old man who has the courage needed to challenge our contemporary utopia -- the ideology of pooh-poohing controversial issues and hoping they will somehow go away...Even if -- as we all hope -- Oliveira's message of the coming end of Western civilization and the advent of a new Middle Ages is only a warning, this film is among the most important pictures shown at this year's Venice Festival." - Janina Kumaniecka, FIPRESCI (International Critics Association)