Last Holiday
Once in a while, I see a movie that really shakes up the way I think about film, the world, or both. From the past decade of filmmaking, there's just a small handful that really qualify: Kiarostami's
Taste of Cherry, Sokurov's
Russian Ark, Jia's
Platform and
Still Life, Morris's
The Fog of War, Hou's
Three Times. Add to that list Manoel de Oliveira's
A Talking Picture (which I'm embarrassingly late catching up with), the most striking of the seven de Oliveira features I've seen.
As with most of the films on my shortlist above,
A Talking Picture is a meditation on history, concerned particularly with the process by which we interpret the events of the past and lessons we should be learning from them. The deceptively simple first half of de Oliveira's film follows a Portugese history teacher (de Oliveira mainstay Leonor Silveira) and her young daughter (Filipa de Almeida) as they venture by sea from Lisbon to Bombaby (where, she repeatedly tells people they meet along the way, they're joining her husband, an airline pilot). They stop at Marseilles, Pompeii, Athens, Istanbul, and Cairo, with the woman--glimpsing ancient wonders for the first time, after teaching her students about them--explaining to her inquisitive daughter the origins and legends surrounding each. Her approach to this is neither overly pedantic nor simplified; it most closely resembles that of a great historical storyteller (a Homer or Virgil, say).
This series of educational, visually captivating excursions combined with de Oliveira's leisurely pace serve to create a lovely rhythm for this early half--and then, quite abruptly, the focus shifts to the ship's American captain (an appropriately hammy John Malkovich) and his three famous dinner guests: a successful French businesswoman (Catherine Deneuve), an Italian former model (Stefania Sandrelli), and a Greek singer and actress (Irene Papas). Their conversation is long, as they each speak in their native tongue (an experiment of sorts initiated by Malkovich's character), pontificating about life and death and love and gender and politics.
It's a fascinating scene, and a curious one. Each personality at the table seems to be playing an exaggerated version of themselves, while, at the same, standing in as sociocultural ciphers for their respective countries. Their collective tone is broad and rather flowery, partly because each participant probably only understands so much of the other languages being spoken. What they sound like is the sort of "worldly," aristocratic characters that populate 19th Century Western literature, albeit voicing some very contemporary concerns at the start of the new millennium (the film, released in 2003, is set pointedly in July of 2001).
A second roundtable discussion follows, this one including the professor and her daughter. The only catch is the other three women don't speak Portugese, though the captain does understand it and speaks a little ("I spent some years in Brazil," Malkovich explains). So, this conversation is conducted in English, with naturally, the widespread use of the English language dissected at length by the Europeans. The tone here, by contrast, is considerably more modern, with the threat of Islamic fundamentalists a topic of interest as the ship sails further East.
What comes next I won't disclose in this space--you really need to experience it yourself, if you haven't already. I will say that
A Talking Picture takes a very unexpected late turn that irrevocably recolors all that's preceded it. If it leaves you feeling uneasy--well, that's very much the point. You never know when history's going to happen.
