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The narrative takes the form of a cruise from Lisbon to Istanbul and the Gateway to the East; as such there is an implicit guided tour from Western civilization history and associations to Eastern. Longtime Oliveira muse Silveira plays (or "represents" would be more appropriate) a history professor conducting her young daughter on this tour, introducing to her in the most disassociated sort of way cultural landmarks and meanings. This takes up the first half almost exactly and the rest is a combination of this and even more explicit such musings around the captain's table, featuring Malkovich, Deneuve, Papas and Sandrelli. The Silveira character is obviously educated, a repository of historical facts and knowledge, but what is subtly emphasized is that this only constitutes a partial understanding; she understands but she doesn't (and this goes for the rest of the characters too, all civilized to a fault; it's what keeps them all blinkered to the larger, geopolitical reality around them). It's important I think that she's distinguished from just another tourist as someone who does have more knowledge and understanding than that so that this partiality, this insufficiency means more. Cultural myths are recognized, for instance, but really only at arms length and from a strictly analytical distance. There is something admirable in that but an incapability of comprehending how that is or may still be integrated in is the failure of it as an applied technique even, or perhaps especially, when that is self-implicating. We see this expressed throughout in a variety of quietly insinuating ways (e.g. "It's the Greeks who protect Greece", "Which Middle Ages are we in now?", the childless group at the captain's table, the fastidious way Malkovich removes his uniform at the end when it's already too late, etc.). It's the general tendency to view history as already over, already a museum piece.

What's curious about this or even slightly strange is just how self-implicating it is as a technique. Oliveira has always distinguished himself and his work exactly through the same sort of analytical, distanced precision, both formally and intellectually, as is under review here. So it is surprising really to see him be this scrupulous about it. But that is finally a testament I think to the extent of his irony. And it's never a simplistically either-or argument; his approach is less a polemical critique than a pointed observation.