The final shot of Manoel de Oliveira's essay-film A Talking Picture startles some audience members into gasping and some into laughing. The ending seems to come out of nowhere, though its seeds are planted in the film's first 90 minutes, amid the thicket of words that prompted the title. Most of A Talking Picture plays straight and staid, following a Portuguese history professor (Leonor Silveira) as she cruises around Europe with her daughter (Filipa de Almeida), visiting the landmarks of Western civilization. The little girl asks many questions, and Silveira and interested passersby answer her with long explanations of how culture has struggled and thrived through the centuries.
The scenery makes A Talking Picture a kind of visual vacation, though the gorgeous location footage blocks the history lesson, because if viewers get caught up looking at some old statue, they can't back up and read the subtitles they missed. Nevertheless, the first part of the movie has a rigid integrity, which de Oliveira risks with the second part: an extended captain's-table conversation that leads A Talking Picture into precariously pretentious, silly territory. John Malkovich plays the cruise-ship captain, a smug, effete American who invites Catherine Deneuve (representing France), Stefania Sandrelli (Italy), and Irene Papas (Greece) to banter in their own languages about their respective countries' contributions to the advancement of mankind. The chat goes on forever, and Malkovich makes a distractingly dopey host, but after a while it becomes sort of shameful fun to watch the movie sink so spectacularly. Then de Oliveira's concluding statement casts everything—the sinking included—in a new, fiery light.
A Talking Picture's directness gives every minor detail a potentially deeper meaning. Why are all the national representatives female, apart from Malkovich? Why are the leads Portuguese, and what's the significance of their travels to India? Does it matter that Silveira's absent husband is a pilot? In the end, the clue that explains the movie involves de Almeida's doll, which represents the culture everyone talks around, but nobody invites to the table. De Oliveira wraps A Talking Picture with a simultaneous introduction and farewell—a bold curtain-dropper that's either a bleak joke or an imprecisely controlled scream of rage.