It was indeed mostly a portrait of a history professor on her travels with her young (but not too young to behave) daughter.

So I waited for John Malkovich’s character to arrive. Then there was still more talking with less history. For those of you wary of subtitles, yes the foreign languages continued at that point, except with a smattering of English (Malkovitch sticks mostly but not entirely to his native tongue).

I watched about half of this and not enough of it was in Portuguese and all in all it was fairly boring. And I have a decent tolerance for movies that basically entail people wandering around talking (See The Barbarian Invasions & The Decline of the American Empire) but this was just a history lesson disguised as film making.