That sinking feeling: James Quandt on Manoel de Oliveira's A Talking Picture.

THE TENDER, NOSTALGIC QUALITY of Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira's recent films I'm Going Home and Oporto of My Childhood suggests that he has succumbed to the serenity expected of the artist in old age--a senescent "late style" of harmony and reconciliation, as Edward Said described it in one of his last essays. Now in his mid-nineties and as prolific as ever. Oliveira has for decades maintained his august reputation with a series of often cryptic and demanding works. Where much Portuguese cinema tends toward reticence and melancholy, toward the sad, soulful qualities of fado and saudade, Oliveira's is brashly theatrical and garrulous. Blithely unmindful of his audience's learning and patience, Oliveira is prone to arcana, anachronism, and protraction. Novices drawn by a starry cast to the brilliant, troubling A Talking Picture (which opens in New York next month) may find themselves bored or bewildered, but his adherents will be undaunted by the film's mix of apocalyptic comedy and political allegory, its nurtured longueurs and stilted artifice. Beneath Picture's seemingly benign irony lurks a dire warning; Oliveira is no serene sage but a severe defender of his faith--or, rather, faiths.

Neatly bifurcated. A Talking Picture begins as Brechtian travelogue. A history professor (the exquisite Leonor Silveira) becomes a contemporary Vasco da Gama, taking her young daughter on a sea cruise whose final destination is Bombay. Departing from misty Lisbon, the professor delivers a series of history lessons to her inquisitive daughter--and to us. Against postcard settings of Pompeii, the Acropolis, the Hagia Sofia, and the pyramids at Giza--pristinely shot to look like dioramas--she discourses on myths, legends, and wisdom, on natural catastrophes and the struggles that have borne and destroyed nations. Her disquisitions on Hellenic antiquity and the nature of civilization are counterpointed by comments on the historic conflict between Christianity and Islam, foreshadowing the film's surprise finale, as do the frontal, static compositions of Silveira and daughter which turn mother and child literally into an icon of innocence, nurture, knowledge.

Despite its historical density, the film's first half manages to be breezy and bracing. Silveira's uninflected acting and the film's unvarying rhythms and visual repetitions intensify the charm of the professor's semi-Socratic discussions with her inquisitive tyke, and odd little mysteries abound (why, for instance, is a very white dog called Sooty?). Having established his historical argument, Oliveira suddenly steers the ship, and his film, into dangerous waters when it enters the Persian Gulf. The professor and her daughter become bystanders to someone else's colloquy. Three famous women have embarked: a French businesswoman, Delphine (Catherine Deneuve), in Marseille; an Italian model, Francesca, nicknamed Aphrodite (Stefania Sandrelli), in Naples; and a Greek singer, Helena (Irene Papas), in Athens. That they are allegorical figures is apparent from their origins (representing three of Europe's great civilizations); their mythical names: and the color coding of their clothes and hair, which associates them, respectively, with wisdom, passion, and art.

The anticipation of this trio of divas dishing over dinner is quickly stanched by John Malkovich, who plays the ship's American captain. Tellingly enlightened and worldly in this emblematic setting, he acts as host and interlocutor to the dames as they sup, swig champagne, and dispense weary sagesse. "I've noticed you are quite a flatterer!" Deneuve laughs, with Gallic understatement: Not since Uriah Heep has so undulatory an adulator been imagined. Conceived as a Conradian character forever wed to the sea, the skipper delivers his sycophantic apercus and oily obsequies as if extruding marrow from hummingbird bones. The frequently stylized quality of Malkovich's acting, hooded and hushed with epicene accents, here tips into bizarre self-parody, and his performance makes it difficult to concentrate on the conversation.

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At first it hardly matters, as Oliveira loads up with fatuous chat about love ("passion makes prisoners of women"; "love is a tyrant"), betrayal, and solitude. But the commentary soon deeppens in both eccentricity and import, taking on grand matters of history, civilization, and language. At times the three women (furies? sorceresses?) spout observations that sound like recent Godard--"the English language has colonized the world"--and bemoan the homogenized culture of the new European Union. Oliveira clearly shares with Godard a concern with cultural memory, and the talk ultimately centers on loss: vanquished civilizations, dead languages, vanished societies, lost ideals. Seizing on the pillage of Alexander's library by fundamentalists as an enduringly symbolic attack on knowledge and wisdom. Papas instead proposes "convergent," not divisive, values.

That Oliveira intends these polyglot musings as a kind of Platonic symposium--an update on the philosophical dinners in Chris Marker's 1989 epic about the heritage of Greek civilization. The Owl's Legacy--is borne out by the film's apocalyptic ending. After Papas sings, magnificently, heartbreakingly, an ancient Greek song, the captain learns that in Aden terrorists smuggled time bombs on board. The ship's inhabitants--now easily read as representing the achievements and memory of Western civilization--face the same devastation as Alexander's burned library, again at the hands of extremists. Who gets saved and who doesn't emphasizes the baleful nature of Oliveira's prognostication; a Catholic modernist and skeptical humanist, he clearly sees his values under threat by resurgent fundamentalism. Audiences typically respond with derision to the final freeze-frame of Malkovich's traumatized moue; but stick through the end credits, and Papas's lovely a capella returns briefly as both a benediction and a reminder that, for Oliveira, art and culture continue to exist, and to offer solace, even as the noite escura of a new Dark Age descends upon us.

James Quandt is senior programmer at Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto.