A Talking Picture (Um Filme Falado)

SYNOPSIS

Effortlessly gliding from graceful travelogue to playful star-driven caprice to trenchant cautionary fable, A Talking Picture is "a majestic and profound work by one of the greatest of all living filmmakers" (Chicago Tribune). Writer-director Manoel de Oliveira (I’m Going Home, Voyage to the Beginning of the World) has created a valedictory cinematic masterpiece that balances timeless beauty with audacious theatricality in order to explore the fanciful myths and grim ironies that define Western Civilization at a millennial crossroads.

In July of 2001, eight-year-old Maria Joana embarks on an ocean cruise from her native Portugal to Bombay, India accompanied by her mother, history professor Rosa Maria (Leonor Silveira). But as three mysterious and glamorous women, each played by a world-renowned film legend, board first at Marseilles (Catherine Deneuve - Time Regained), Naples (Bernardo Bertolucci muse Stefania Sandrelli) and Athens (Irene Papas - The Trojan Women, Antigone), their picturesque journey begins to grow in tension and complexity. When ship captain John Walesa (John Malkovich - The Ogre) hosts a unique summit between these three international graces, the table is literally set to transform A Talking Picture from a genial melancholic history lesson into an incendiary contemporary news flash.

Deftly, lovingly and confidently crafting a film of subtle rhythms, deep conviction and shocking contrasts, 96 year old Manoel de Oliveira "appears unstoppable" (The Boston Globe) and conclusively demonstrates he is "a master of the medium" (The New York Times). "With rare eloquence," A Talking Picture "speaks to our hearts and minds about modern quandaries and eternal truths." (The Chicago Tribune)

REVIEWS

"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)

DVD Features

• "Manoel de Oliveira: A Career" An essay by Richard Peña, Program Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center and Associate Professor of Film Studies, Columbia University
• Trailer
• Stills Gallery
• A Manoel de Oliveira Filmography
• Optional English subtitles
• Enhanced for 16x9 TVs