Nação Valente

Proving his crafty and dextrous talent, Carlos Conceicao's first fully fictional feature is a jewel for the ages. Formal and structurally audacious in a way that increases its power and meaning as the film unfolds, this study of a military squadron gradually unraveling in a remote and blood-soaked wilderness begins with a clear sense of time, place and space, before collapsing those certainties into a nightmare of terror that harks back to the impact of colonialism across the ages. As in his previous film, the semi-documentary Serpentarius, from the 2019 Berlinale, Tommy Guns draws some of its power from the seductive beauty of imagery. Given this arthouse formalism, the embrace of genre (in this case, horror and thriller) is quite audacious, especially during a final, world-ending revelation that might easily have crumbled in less crafty hands, but Conceicao never lets go of his firm tone throughout. In fact, this final twist, once the shock has passed, expands the scope of the movie in ways that continue to ingrain themselves in the brain long afterwards. It makes the story no longer just about Portugal and Angola, nor just about the evil legacy of colonialism in general. Instead, Tommy Guns constructs, in a strange and sneaky way, a parable of despair at the mass (predominantly male) delusion that is war itself, and a sly, angry lament for the way the spread of a war mentality makes victims of so many, fools of some, and irrevocably deluded idiots of all the others.

It's not often that you see war films that experiment and become more of an arthouse piece.

But this one decided to shift tones dramatically and give us something not as straightforward.

The opening is quite dramatic with some brutal sequences and a great use of the landscape to make it almost feel like a horror.

Then we get something a little about the imagery rather than the narrative structure. It is different and I wasn't sure if I was on board with it.

There's not much to speak of from an acting side as there were no standouts. It's more of an ensemble piece and they all did a perfectly functional job.

It's honestly a hard film to sum up as the changes in its vibe and tone challenges you. It is certainly well made, very atmospheric especially in the opening act, contains a lot of strong imagery and gives you an idea of the true events it's portraying.

While it may lack in logic. This was more of a symbolic portrait of war with supernatural edges to it.

A meandering repetitious film, devoid of characterization, rhythm, or honest political insight.

All those echoes of Jacques Tourneur, Pedro Costa or Miguel Gomes only betray the essences of what these film masters achieved in their vibrant and haunting critiques of colonialism. Conceicao tries too hard to emulate their styles and tempos, but he simply lacks the know-how and intellectual foundation to pull it off.

And just as sadly, the director fails to approach the eloquence of the zombie genre "master classes" achieved by true pop iconoclasts like Romero or Jarmusch.

Conceicao may be somewhat well-grounded in the history of his homeland, but he doesn't seem to comprehend the positive value of the terms "offhanded" and "entertaining". But credit is still due to Anabela Moreira as "Apolonia" for a valiant effort in what is otherwise a desert of film performance..

While the first harsh, brutally descriptive shots of Nação Valente do the best to set you in a certain place and historical context, rest assured that nothing in this film is what it seems. Although there is a fair share of time specifications (a date on screen, different types of telephones), Conceição's setting for Nação Valente is curiously timeless.

As in previous efforts, Conceição manages to deliver highly effective storytelling without hardly any dialogue, like an invisible observer, whilst building up tension and using ambiguity to convey his points. It's a work with a haunting, fable-like quality, a narrative that might as easily be about seven medieval samurais were it not for the intrusion of modern weapons and record players. Its floating sense of loose time, its gentle pans across the African landscape as Zé tries to remember his mother, all feel a world apart from modernity. That ancient heart is perhaps the whole purpose of the film, which at its final quarter holds a mirror to our face as we are left wondering in shame if we have indeed evolved at all since the crusades. While Conceição's previous films began to pencil in his worldview, Nação Valente's perspective is drawn in ink. It doesn't feel like an experiment, or playful in the autobiographical manner of Serpentarius; it is a vision that blooms as an allegory. A film of despair and optimism, cruelty and salvation - and its own clandestine sense of humor - Nação Valente contains philosophical and spiritual dimensions, and a unified visual poetry, that qualify it as Conceição's first masterpiece. It's a highly ambitious work which succeeds on its purposes as both a work of history, unstinting in its concrete depiction of political hatred and fear, and a portrait of the metaphysics of tyranny.

Tommy Guns/Nacao Valente is not your run-of-the-mill Saturday movie that might be viewed in terms of what we think we know about film making and storytelling. In all truth, it is a formally radical and sometimes even experimental film in its unique way of employing the viewer's reasoning (and what the viewer knows about genre cinema and its allegories) as a tool to lead them to question themselves and the nature of military cruelty across cultures and generations. In that sense, I had never seen a film that exposed my own prejudices, much less one that was so free of false moralism or the need to satisfy the audience. Nacao Valente risks the opposite: it risks disappointing the audience by suggesting different genre tropes that it will never pursue, it risks confusing the audience by changing the protagonist (and a lot more) half an hour into the film, it risks by mischievously flirting with the political standpoint it ends up condemning, it risks by placing itself for the longest time in the oppressor's point of view, it risks by opening a historical context to a universal vision.

But boy, does the film satisfy! Kudos to Kino Lorber for bringing us this brave gem of auteur cinema which introduces Carlos Conceicao to us as a new name to watch out for. Mandatory viewing for all film lovers!