Fresh sea air, loud engine sound, grim ship-front, picturesque costumes, tired but charming celebrities, lovely feminine poses - all constitutes tactile and very real and moving pictures in Talking Picture. It is the "talking" part of the picture that feels purposefully fake: too subdued, too polite, too inexpressive, too unoriginal, too boring and even too unpretentious for Oliveira.
A motionless mother with the face of an accountant, who turns out to be a "beautiful" history college professor is telling her daughter clumsy and uninspiring stories using poor language taken from a 4-th grade history textbook and enthusiasm of a student who is forced to retell what she remembers to get a B.
Three ex-beauties with the "know it all faces" exchanging tacky but supposedly elegant remarks about men and women; intellectual wannabe captain endlessly repeating the fact that everybody at the table speaks their own language, and he speaks this language and that language, and everybody understands each other language, and this languages was taught here and this language started there, so many words are said in each of those languages, so many useless, meaningless words.
And that is why when he says that there is a bomb on the ship with the same subdued manner, these words are also meaningless. Everybody is calm. When the girl runs back to get her doll the mother of course runs after her, but not so fast, not so fast as they run in Hollywood action movies - because the words about the bomb are fake, and maybe so is the bomb? But the pictures in the Talking pictures are real, and maybe so is the bomb...
A motionless mother with the face of an accountant, who turns out to be a "beautiful" history college professor is telling her daughter clumsy and uninspiring stories using poor language taken from a 4-th grade history textbook and enthusiasm of a student who is forced to retell what she remembers to get a B.
Three ex-beauties with the "know it all faces" exchanging tacky but supposedly elegant remarks about men and women; intellectual wannabe captain endlessly repeating the fact that everybody at the table speaks their own language, and he speaks this language and that language, and everybody understands each other language, and this languages was taught here and this language started there, so many words are said in each of those languages, so many useless, meaningless words.
And that is why when he says that there is a bomb on the ship with the same subdued manner, these words are also meaningless. Everybody is calm. When the girl runs back to get her doll the mother of course runs after her, but not so fast, not so fast as they run in Hollywood action movies - because the words about the bomb are fake, and maybe so is the bomb? But the pictures in the Talking pictures are real, and maybe so is the bomb...