I'm sure she speaks highly of him also.

Welcome to the Internet.

Oh come now. I grant you I was asking for it by insulting one of the sacred cows of cinephilia, but I don't think La Deneuve really needed four indignant posts defending her honor. She gets by quite nicely without my affection. I'm sincerely baffled by the devotion she inspires in cinephiles--straight and gay. I'll refrain from speculating on the psychosexual basis of her allure.

I've long since resigned myself that I part ways with almost everyone on this point, but I find her deeply unappealing. Surely you've all had unpopular opinions? Is it really so shocking? Will I ever be taken seriously here?

qu'importe! I hardly think it's necessary to argue points about an actor, for whom one doesn't have the expected itch.

As for Deneuve my response to her chilled suddenly with the newly cosmetically expressionless face in Huit Femmes. Fortunately Techine helps bring her back in les Temps qui Changent. Coincidentally Emanuelle Beart seemed also to debut her newly enhanced lips in Techine's les Egares - which certainly distracted me from her performance. Along with the Bunuels (she was born for perversion) Deneuve's most sexually charged movie is Hustle. The casting against Burt is absolutely inspired - Aldrich avoids the temptation to deliver them both as comicbook sex god(esses) and they have amazing chemistry.

As for psychosexual - I wish you would speculate. At that level she's "merely" a Hitchcockian/Bunuelian blonde to me - although a friend once sat next to her at the Broome St Bar in SoHo and had to be carried out (by his new wife) a quivering mess. But he is hetero.

How do you respond to Isabelle Huppert? Is she not now surely the reigning Queen of Kink, ( a noble tradition magnificently heralded by the great Ingrid Thulin) even down to complete dreck like ma Mere, and compelling for every second of screen time?

I didn't see Huit Femmes, but the cosmetic refinish was in evidence in Talking Picture and Rois et reine as well. And to keep this barely relevant to Belle toujours, Ogier has had something ghastly done as well.

I like Isabelle Huppert, but much more so in her "old" age. At least as late as Godard's Passion she kind of annoyed me, but I think she's really blossomed since the mid-90s. For me she has much more natural gravity--and charisma--than Deneuve has ever displayed. Deneuve has always seemed like an empty vessel to me. There's a way in which distance can be tantalizing and seductive, but Deneuve's distance has always seemed to me to be a mask with nothing behind it.

The Hitchcockian blonde doesn't do much for me, but Eva Marie Sainte and even Kim Novak seem much earthier than Deneuve, who just turns my blood cold. Obviously many men find her glacial hauteur appealing, but it's a kink I just don't share.

I usually find such matters largely irrelevant to my appreciation of a film. But with Deneuve she was frequently cast in roles where I'm made to feel like the film expects me to see her in a particular way--and I just can't.

Quick! Someone invite Camille Paglia to this forum - I'm sure she could add a few comments as to what one could love in Deneuve.

fred, I don't mind your trashing of CD so much as your dismissing my much beloved Bulle Ogier. ;~}

For what it's worth I find Ogier much more bearable than Deneuve. And she has a perpetual free pass for her work in L'Amour fou (a performance Deneuve could only dream of)--though I've come close to revoking it at times.

What would tempt revocation?

I haven't seen anything "recent" by Ogier other than Rivette's "Gang of Four" (where I thought she was wonderful) and "Irma Vep" (where I thought she was fine).

I don't want to go out of my way to bash Ogier, who I find more or less innocuous, if blandly so. In her favor she doesn't seem to inspire the kind of cultish devotion that Deneuve does. But films like Vénus beauté don't endear her to me. And I do find her a little creepy.

Gang of Four is actually my second least favorite of the 17 Rivettes I've seen to date, though I hope to revisit it soon. (As far as Rivette's actresses go I'm more partial to Sandrine Bonnaire and Jeanne Balibar.)

But let us agree about Takamine.

And now we've gone really far afield of the Oliveira.

Cathy D became dead to me when she got the fishlips. I still respect her work--she did not "need" to do many of the art films that she did.

B. O. rocks. She is absolutely amazing in every single Rivette she has done. Just stunning. Also great in La Salamandre and many other roles. But she has fishlips too, unfortunately.

But to compare them is apples and oranges, no?

EDITED TO ADD: Well I saw this last night. One of M.O.'s more enjoyable films but, like much of his recent work, quite trivial. I still don't understand why the crix regard him so highly.

You're kidding me, right? Someone whose entire subject is life and death, history and civilization? A Talking Picture was trivial? The Fifth Empire was trivial? If so, then what isn't? Saw III?

John Cope (or anyone else): Can you recommend a critical essay that deals with A Talking Picture? I just saw it for the first time and have some tentative ideas about its meaning but I'd like to explore another perspective. (And it needn't be available on the web.)

If so, thanks in advance.

Here is a Senses of Cinema article specifically on the film.

I haven't seen the film yet, so I'm of no further help here! (Oliviera's films are sadly yet another gap in my film knowledge that I haven't filled yet!)

I could not possibly agree more. That piece is absolutely superb. I've forwarded it to many people as a valued counter balance to the insipid and shallow readings of the film that are unfortunately prevalent. Now if only someone would do a similar job with The Letter.

A Talking Picture is one of his most accessible, even fun, films. But partially destroyed by Malkovich's fey, irksome perf, and an ill-advised freeze-frame at the end.

Edited to add: wow some of my postings in this thread seem bitter and angry. I like the old fella, just think he's overrated.

Thanks. It's in part an insightful essay, but I am very unsure of a few of its basic premises.

I vigorously disagree with the essay's consistent use of "East" and "West" as distinct cultural entities. Even more problematic is the authors' simplistically Huntingtonian bent, and all their offhand refences to recent events as a continuation of the Trojan War and as part of "the history of conflict between East and West" dating back millennia to the digging of the Suez Canal, which allowed these fundamentally opposed groups closer contact and as a natural result (at least to this way of thinking) conflict. They even use the term "clash of civilisations." These kinds of simplistic assumptions are worse than the borderline demagogic lessons Rosa Maria gives her daughter throughout much of the film.

The authors' association of the "reversal" (interesting term) of Western culture with "Armageddon" reminds me of Bernard Lewis' warnings in the 1980s that the demise of Western culture would lead to the return of child marriage, polygamy, and slavery, as would an end to "curiosity about other cultures." In the context of Lewis' remarks, no one was really suggesting a purging of Western culture, and I'm not sure that's what the faceless terrorists of A Talking Picture should be assumed to represent, either.

Finally, and less importantly, I'm not sure why we should consider the Malkovich character an "emasculated" person.

But he's talking with women and treating them as intelligent conversationalists! Actually, when I watched the movie, I was reminded of Alec Guinness' character in The Captain's Paradise, where he plays a ferry captain who lives a double-life on both sides of the Straits of Gibralter. Since he has two wives, he insists on only seating men at his captain's table for dinner during the crossings. Kind of a weird juxtaposition of movies, I know, but there it is.

Sorry, that doesn't really add anything useful to this thread....

I appreciate the time you've given to this, Gregory, and would like to hear more of your thoughts on the film. Having said that, it's very difficult for me to agree with you here. For one thing, I certainly don't think this essay is simplistic in the least. I'm not as familiar with Huntington and Lewis's theories on culture and ideology as I'd like to be (though you've motivated me to seek them out) but if they espouse anything nearly as rich as what this piece presumes to be Oliveira's intentions then I'm apt to find them other than simplistic as well.

It's interesting that I should be making this defense because generally I would rush to affiliate myself with anything which encouraged a more complex, less reductive take. But there is precedent for me. I've often argued strongly for Martha Nochimson's theories on Lynch though she is dismissed outright by those who see her Jungian ideas as "reductionist". My feeling is that any stated philosophical position can be seen as a reduction of possibility but the only way to maintain endlessly open and expansive readings is really not to attempt interpretation or comprehension at all. Sure it reveals biases but I see that as unavoidable. I support Nochimson, for instance, because I see her take on Lynch as the one that allows for the greatest possibilities, even if she necessarily delimits the discourse by directing it.

Ultimately, I just agree in principle with what I suspect you see as a monolithic simplification. It is not, and I feel the article does a great job of communicating the subtleties and nuances of an interpretation based on these underlying ideas. I will gladly reveal my own biases as a student of MacIntyre, Nussbaum and Milbank. For whatever it's worth, check out Philip Jenkins' book The Next Christendom which deals with some of the same things you referred to, specifically the notion that ideology will determine future social allegiances. Obviously there are opposing views and Oliveira's work (as per his usual standard of ironic excellence) does not demand one reading but that all readings are weighted in opposition to one another. The conclusions we draw must be our own.

As far as Malkovich goes, I read his character pretty much the same way as do the authors of this piece. Their argument makes a lot of sense to me. The wonderfully astute moment at the end of the movie in which he prepares to act by methodically removing his uniform is a succinct and perfect depiction of the paralysis and impotence of intellectuals incapable of reacting spontaneously (which would demand that their foundational preconceptions are solid enough to act on in the first place, not purely ephemeral and abstract as suggested here). The loss implied in this film is the loss of an ability to construct meaningful, active responses out of initially abstract, even imagined ideas--idealism as the basis of constructive action. This is, by the way, the same basic point Oliveira is striving to get at in The Letter, another film horrendously misconstrued. If you want to see reductionist readings, take a look at most reviews of that.

The main idea I took from the film on my first viewing was the idea of the-field-of-history-as-pleasure-cruise. The history professor is from Portugal but had never before immersed herself in the sites on the Mediterranean that she researches and teaches about. As a result of this, I think, we see her operating in a very ivory tower mode, answering her daughter's fresh, precocious questions with a detached sense of one distant from the immediate relevance of what she is discussing. In the end, her failure to make connections between the history relevant to the Middle East and anything going on in the present left her totally vulnerable to what befalls her and her daughter at the end. The essay has refined this reading in some ways that I'll have to think about further before articulating them. Again, I only thought it was simplistic only in the general respects I identified, which in fact replicated in some ways the attitudes and assumptions the teacher expressed in the film, showing her lack of worldliness.

I think the most crucial source that informs this part of the discussion of the film, and the essay we've been discussing, is Edward Said. His books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism have of course been widely influential (the latter is less specific to the Middle East than the former but is in several ways superior). More specific to Samuel Huntington was an essay Said published in the Nation on Oct 22, 2001 under the title "The Clash of Ignorance." It also appeared in his last collection of essays, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map, under the title "Adrift in Similarity." I'd recommend reading that essay rather than Huntington's Clash of Civilizations itself, which was a maddeningly simple and basic idea padded out to fill an article, and then extended further into a book. As for Lewis, he has remained the quintessential orientalist, and while many take him to be an expert on the Middle East, I think his notions reveal themselves to be stereotypes and caricatures of the Middle East more than anything else. A recent example of this is his book What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East.
Perhaps all theoretical positions are to some extent reductionist, in some construal of the term, but I think some are far more so than others.

Gregory, I hope you're right that Lewis's bleak analysis is based on "stereotypes and caricatures," and that he is overstating the rigidity of resistance to modernity in the Islamic world.

Though I do believe that Oliveira's film does posit a "clash of civilizations" (this idea fits within his Catholicity--see also The Satin Slipper), I do not believe for a minute that that simplifies his scenario; it is only an ideological starting point. What complicates things is his grand irony. He is without question sympathetic to the notion of Western civilization with all that represents (or did represent). It is far too easy to say, however, that he necessarily believes that it should emerge triumphant from this clash as it presently stands. A Talking Picture is a lesson for us, not for Maria Joana, and it is not a didactic one. It demands that we consider what is worth salvaging and what will motivate that action. As a friend of mine has said, history consists of long periods of indifference ruptured sporadically by conviction and, yes, even politically unfashionable passionate zeal. If we don't have it, then who will because it is always possessed by someone.

John, I hope I haven't put you on the defensive. I'm not attacking the film, just trying to understand it.

I wondered about this. It is interesting that the captain poses the ideal of a sort of global village of which his table is perhaps a microcosm, where divisions between cultures are breached (they can nearly always understand what the others say in their own languages) without surrendering to assimilation (they each maintain their native languages as speakers). Manichean talk about age-old conflicts between civilizations would be completely alien to this worldview, in its most ideal forms. But it is significant, I think, that all the women at his table are European.
Anyway, "Western civilization" is impossibly vague. It's too tempting to think of the term in reference to a more or less monolithic group unchanging through time and in a position of fundamental opposition to other "civilizations."

Couldn't it be both?

Saw III is a work of staggering genius...the director just wraps that material around his thumb...