Talking Picture [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

This film,"A Talking Picture",is literally that,a film-travelogue of a Portuguese Professor and her daughter ,who engage in a history lesson while the two travel around the Mediterranean,the cradle of the civilization that Europe emerged from,while they visit its major landmarks on a Mediterranean cruise.The mother explains to her daughter the meanings of `myth', 'civilization', 'nature','mosque' etc. the tour stops off at Pompeii, the Acropolis, and the Pyramids. Throughout, little Maria Joana acts as blank, baffled slate, soaking in the contradictions of history. Poised to the point of stiltedness, the parent-child exchanges are strictly informational: the inquisitive girl asks leading questions ("Which Middle Ages are we in now?"), and her impassive mother disgorges reams of encyclopedic dialogue.Jean Luc Godard drew heavily on this in his latest film,Film Socialisme. This is a straightforward riff on a Mediterranean cruise as history.I could not take the mother and daughter relationship as anything but symbolical,a hook to put the film's clothing on.No mother however clever talks to her daughter in this way.Similarly later on in the film when the Captain of the ship (Malkovitch),talks with the 3 famous women at his table and they all speak in their own tongues-Greek,Italian,English and French-I did not feel any discrepancy, merely poetic license,as they all seemed to understand each other.Love,women,politics and language are the topics presided over by the effete sea-captain.Europe used to have people who spoke more than one language.There is a sense of nostalgic innocence about a timeless beauty that no longer exists.A fable.A millennial crossroads of Western Civilization explodes into a contemporary newsflash.

But it is not only the shock of the film's ending that exposes the deficiency of any such notions, the false sense of security that we, as viewers, share with the film's protagonists. All along the way, as Maria Joana and her mother, Rosa Maria (Leonor Silveira), disembark at successive stops on their odyssey, we begin to discern - in the film's dispassionate loquaciousness, in the director's deliberately static camerawork, in the subtle and not-so-subtle ironies that colour the intellectual colloquy between mother and child as they navigate A Talking Picture`s otherwise childless world - a subversive undercurrent that gradually turns the rich pageant into a full-blown jeremiad, a bittersweet goodbye to the West and its legacy.The little girl's journey is given primacy,before the ship's arrival at Aden,in the Arab world.The West seems old and childless:the elderly fisherman,the Orthodox priest,the actor in Egypt,the 3 distinguished ladies,the captain.Maria Joanna is burdened with an awesome responsibility as the single vessel capable of preserving the legacy of the past for the future.Like the small dog who becomes the anchor of the boat,her daunting destiny leaves us close to the edge.In her hands the future is fragile.Her serious mien seems freighted with preconscious knowledge of the task's enormity.Stories of heroes, protectors and goddesses are presented,receding mistily into the realms of ruin,myth and legend:mermaids,muses,the myth of the statue of Athena inside the Parthenon that inspired the wisdom of philosophers,playwrights, musicians. Who protects Greece now?With the face of the broken Sphinx in Egypt,we sense a civilization that no longer believes in its own protective myths.The camera lingers on the monuments when people are gone,mute,abandoned by history. Globalised English,not the original Greek dominate,marginalizing culture by commerce.

The closer exchange between East and West e.g. the Suez Canal,has put them on a collision course.Reversing Ulysses journey home westward away from war,the mother and her daughter travel eastwards towards the absent father, towards war,the spectre of September 11th in front of them.In this Homeric reversal speech becomes a decadent luxury devoid of action.Words have become descriptive,as Helen says at dinner,"No Civilization lasts forever".