“A Talking Picture” does just that – talk – nonstop, from beginning to end. The words (and pictures) have been invented by the sublime Manoel de Oliveira, and so they are among the most interesting to be heard in a movie all year. Heard and read, to be exact: the dialogue is spoken in Portuguese, French, Italian, Greek, and English. Unless you’re terrifically polylingual, you’ll be reading at least some of the subtitles. Language being a central preoccupation of the film, this is understandable, but you’re also clearly meant to read the movie.

Mr. Oliveira’s picture is a kind of essay, and the subject is nothing less than Western civilization – from a very specific and singular vantage point. The title contains a sly inside joke: As one of the few living filmmakers who began working in the silent era, the 96-year-old Mr. Oliveira can claim the advent of talking pictures as a living memory. When someone nearing a century of life makes a film about civilization, and that someone possesses a mind as superb as Mr. Oliveira’s, we had better read close.

Rosa Maria (Leonor Silveira) is a professor of history at Lisbon University; Maria Joana (Filipa de Almeida) is her 7-year-old daughter. Together they have embarked on a Mediterranean cruise with a final destination in Bombay, where they will reunite with Rosa’s husband for a family vacation. En route, mother and daughter tour the monuments of the region: Pompeii and Vesuvius, the Parthenon and Acropolis, the Pyramids and Sphinx, the Hagia Sophia.

At each tourist site, Rosa declaims simple history lessons for her daughter, who replies with questions. What is a myth? A legend? A mermaid? A mosque? Who are the Arabs? What is civilization? Good questions. Definitions are complex, contentious things, especially when a civilization is in decline. There is a great deal at stake in their formulation.

Something about the mathematical precision of Rosa’s definitions are at once very comforting and slightly dangerous; their satisfying neatness of line and contour draw a more ambiguous figure than at first may seem. If the mind of the aged Matisse had been resigned to trouble rather than tranquility, his scissors put to a history textbook instead of colored paper, he’d have made work like “A Talking Picture.”

This same clarity informs the limpid photography and the rigorous clip of the editing. Garrulous as it is, “A Talking Picture” would amaze with no soundtrack at all. Mr. Oliveira punctuates each stop of his tour with a beautifully proportioned shot of the ship’s prow cutting through the water, giving us at once a pleasing visual motif, an effective rhythmic device, and an incisive metaphor for civilization cutting through the rough, oceanic vastness of time and space.

Two-thirds through the film, the magical history tour comes to an abrupt stop, and our attention is displaced from the Portuguese explorers to a conference of glamazons. At the invitation of the ship’s captain (John Malkovich), three magnificent women take places at his table for dinner and talk. Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) is a self-made femme d’affairs; Francesca (Stefania Sandrelli) a former Italian model; Helena (Irene Papas) a Greek actress. They’ve agreed to play a “little game of denouncing ourselves” and take turns discussing their lives. Topics range over love, betrayal, self-sufficiency, optimism, culture, and, of course, language.

At a certain point the table notices that everyone’s been speaking in their native tongues, yet effortlessly understand one another. What enables this utopian scenario? The art of cinema is the first, obvious answer. That Mr. Oliveira is, with exquisite irony, staging an Edenic gathering at the precipice of a Fall is another.

This is where “A Talking Picture” talks me into a corner. Every word in this ingenious essay builds to a final, flabbergasting sentence, about which I can say nothing. Suffice to hint that, from the beginning, the presence of Islam has thrown Mr. Oliveira’s historical panoramas into relief. A peculiar sense of menace has been creeping into the movie, and there’s a sense that mother and daughter (and the world historical narrative they embody) may be destined for somewhere other than they imagined.

Until December 17 (32 Second Avenue, at Second Street, 212-505-5181).