Our Civilization and its Discontents

Written on Sunday 26th February 2006, at the end of a badly started (and badly continued) week.

“Anxiety, work pressure, events, thoughts and readings with no clear direction, solipsism, seeing our flaws in the mirror of those we love and, last but not least, the uneasiness of moving about a city with this gloomy indistinct threat hanging over [Al Qaeda’s menaces to the Vatican were recent at the time of this writing].”

“Woke up early and watched ‘A talking picture’ on TV (Um Filme Falado, 2003), written and directed by the Portuguese 96-years-old director Manoel de Oliveira. Joana and her mother Rosa Maria (Leonor Silveira), teaching history at a university in Lisbon, embark on a cruise ship directed to Bombay to meet Rosa Maria’s husband, an airline pilot. Now and then a new woman joins the cruise, both famous and lonely: Catherine Deneuve (a French businesswoman), Stefania Sandrelli (an Italian ex-supermodel) and Irene Papas (a Greek singer and actress). The ship captain (the US actor John Malkovich) gallantly invites the three divas to dine at his table. Later Joana and Rosa Maria are also invited and the whole cast of actors (and bunch of characters) is now together.”

“Surreal in this movie is the fact that every character speaks in his/her own language: Portuguese and English the captain plus mother and daughter; Greek, French and Italian the three divas. All of them though perfectly understand each other. This weird language thing, while making the movie hard for the masses, gives life to a fascinating cosmopolitan symposium, the various languages contributing to this effect. We better understand the title of the movie (A talking picture) since here in fact deep and disillusioned dialogues on the Western civilization unfold (its origins, meaning and future) like in a dialectic multilingual book, while the cruise ship slowly crosses the Mediterranean surrounded by some of its most ancient (and fascinating) cities: Marseille, Athens, Naples, Constantinople (Istanbul) etc., not without a last-days-of-Pompeii touch.”

“Joana and her mother had often gone down to visit various places. Once, stopping for a while at a mosque in Istanbul, I believe, Joana asks her mother whether Catholics and Muslims were still at war. “No – replies Rosa Maria – this happened in the Middle Ages” (a newspaper headline I think places the action of the movie in July 2001…a little before the Twin-towers attack)”. Here below you can see Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, taken from the Wikimedia Commons, GNU Free Documentation License.

“That same night of the fine multilingual conversation, the captain informs the crew that two time bombs placed by terrorists are about to explode in the ship. Confusion ensues and the passengers are requested to evacuate the ship in all hurry. Maria however realizing that her daughter is still on board gets back there and finally finding her the two women try to get down on a lifeboat, but all lifeboats are far and gone. The captain sees them on deck from a lifeboat and yells for them to jump, but the two women disappear in the explosion – they being so beautiful, the image of life itself -, a blast we only see as bright light reflected on the aghast face of the captain, while the credits flow down….”

“That same night, some hours before the bombs, the Greek singer (Irene Papas) had chanted an inspired sad melody lamenting how the Greek civilization had been swept away …

as the flowers of the orange tree
swept away by the cold north wind …”

“…a clear metaphor of our own Western world that could be swept away. Well, swept away seems such a stupidity to me, although signals are clear that the world balance is rapidly changing.”

“(Foreseeing this entire world balance change, what Bush (and Blair) after all meant to do but simply try to better position their chess pieces on the geopolitical chessboard, with the aim of delaying the entire Western decline (but finally – and foolishly – screwing it all up, the process having thus been probably accelerated instead)? In this sense this marvellous movie seems even more appropriate to me).”

“Beautiful, minimalistic, despite some rigidity which nonetheless is part of its charm. And, incredible to say, written and directed by a man in his mid-90s, who was born when Franklin D. Roosevelt was at the White House!”

Italian version

PS
This Roosevelt idea – plus the title of the post – I took from this excellent review by W. Addiego, San Francisco Chronicle, who wrote: “the film is stripped down in a way only mature artists can achieve … Though it may resemble an extremely austere travelogue, A Talking Picture is much more. Behind the deceptive air of artlessness, it offers a cutting portrait of civilization — our civilization — and its discontents.”