La dernière fois que j'ai vu Macao

There are plenty of films that proceed from a gimmick and make a success of it. For example there's the impressive "Russian Ark" (2002), a 2-hour film shot entirely in one continuous camera take. Or the opposite: the equally impressive "Man of the Year" (2002), a 2-hour film shot on 22 cameras filming simultaneously in real time. There's "Lady in the Lake" (1947) which was the first feature film shot entirely in first person/POV. And there's "La Jetée" (1962) composed almost entirely of still photos. I enjoyed all of these movies, but as hard as I tried, I couldn't enjoy "Last Time I Saw Macao".

The gimmick of this movie is that it doesn't show any characters. Aside from a 2-minute song & dance routine in the very beginning which may or may not be the character "Candy" whom the narrator is pursuing, there are no actors at all. Instead we get 82 minutes of scenery & seemingly random people with a narrator telling us a story. The images, though artistic, don't always gel with the narrator's story, and after about an hour I realized that this "story" was probably written after the scenes were filmed, loosely (very loosely) tying the footage together.

The IMDb plot summary, confusing and unrevealing as it is, is surprisingly accurate:

"Two filmmakers leave to Macao in an adventure of discovery of a city-labyrinth, multicultural and mysterious ... A personal album of physical and emotional geography, structured as an investigation disguised as a thriller, where the puzzle of the history challenges the reality."

Allow me to translate: directors João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata went to Macao with a camera and shot a whole bunch of city scenery, then tried to weave a thriller out of it. Where it failed is in the way it tries too hard to be a thriller, giving us a contrived, melodramatic story which is completely incongruous with the quiet, mundane scenes we are shown. The story is about a desperate drag queen "Candy" who summons her friend to Macao because she fears for her life. A covered bird cage appears, and people start killing each other over it, so we are told (none of the action is ever shown). The narrator leads us through twists & turns, mostly leading nowhere, for 82 minutes. The resolution of the story is rather contrived & sudden, and it doesn't offer much satisfaction.

German director Wim Wenders has often taken the approach of filming a movie first and writing it later. Somehow he makes it work, like in "Wings of Desire" which came from 10 poems his friend wrote, strung together with artistic visuals and great acting by Peter Falk, Bruno Ganz et al, ultimately telling the story of an angel who gives up his wings.

"Last Time I Saw Macao" struck me as taking the same approach, but it just never came together. Watch it if you just want to see nice images of an exotic city. But if you are looking for any sort of traditional literary story or soul-enhancing truths, you won't find it here. The gimmick just didn't work for me.

This movie deserves to fail based solely on the Storyline description. Who wrote that garbage?

"Two filmmakers leave to Macao in an adventure of discovery of a city-labyrinth, multicultural and mysterious, where the memories of the childhood - featured memories by the lived reality in Macao - have a dialog with the memories of the East built by the codes of the cinema and the literature - memories lived on a featured reality-, creating a testimony which tries to raise the veil on the past and the present time."

That's one whole sentence. Is this rubbish all we have to base our decision on??

This gives almost no insight into the basic premise of the story. Instead it goes out of its way to obfuscate and confuse with a convoluted mishmash of poorly written babble.

Halfway into the film the narrator comments how, after 400 years of Portuguese rule, there was no one able to speak Portuguese in Macau. Yet weirdly, the crux to his comment seemed to be embedded within his narration and direction itself. Not only were the depictions of local life in Macau highly stereotypical, but any native speaker of the Cantonese language would cringe at how unnatural the dialogues are. They are not just inaccurate, they are what you get when you throw English phrases into Google translate and run it through 2 translations and pronouncing them verbatim.

On a less technical note, I found the audio-visual choices to be awkward. At times, what appeared to be the narrator's personal monologue was paired with shots where the unseen protagonist would not have been able to witness. Part of this might come down to the directors' plans to flirt with the noir genre, but in effect this throws the intimacy of the monologue in doubt, as the audience simply cannot decide whether to take the film as a personal monologue or a thriller seen from a divine perspective. As a result, even the narrator's recounting of his childhood days and old family photos turned out to be emotionless and flat. One can't help but wonder how, having spent so much time in Macau, the director still fell pray to such noticeable cultural stereotyping and linguistic negligence.

The reviewr of The New York Times, Manohla Dargis, wrote the movie is "a meditation on movies, myths and memory". This may have been the beginning of the myth some people built around a film that according to its co-directors in various interviews, said (1) that the documentary thing was in an early script presented to obtain some funding; (2) that on location it was evident that the few child memories of one of them (the only one that lived some years in Macau) had vanished; that the opening singing act was an afterthought. A Portuguese spectator encapsulated the whole thing thus: It is not a movie, it's a thing. It seems that when the team went to Macau, they did not know what they were going to do. Well, it shows...

The movie synopsis lies blatantly, suggesting that the movie confronts memories of the 1970s Macau with the 2010s reality: the memories are reduced to a couple of sentences about landscape preserved by the Portuguese and Chinese authorities, and has nothing to do with the gloomy side of borderline towns, Asian or European alike. The authors have said that some scenes had been shot in Lisbon and Almada, Portugal.

A docudrama it is not! One of the co-directors, Guerra da Mata, actually lived his formative years in Macau, up to the 1970s; he opens the movie as the Narrator, by saying «Thirty years later I am on my way to Macau, where I had not been since childhood. I received an email in Lisbon, from Candy, of whom I had not heard for years. She told me that she had been with the wrong men again, and asked me to go to Macau, where strange and frightening things were happening. Tired, after a long flight, I arrive at Macao on the boat that will take me back to the happiest period of my life." Several film reviews take from here - and the fact that there is no fiction drama, or story - to categorize this as documentarist. It is not. The film could have been turned anywhere where there are somber streets, some litter on the pavement, dead rats, and stray cats and dogs. A few (very few) shots of casinos' neon ensigns, a Venetian gondolier that is a casino attraction, and a few (very few) photographs of Chinese banquets, are not enough. Later, when girls in uniform are leaving the Santa Rosa de Lima College, Guerra da Mata seems to regret that there are no boys now at the college he attended, missing the fact that the college had been a religious institution for girls since its foundation, had had major changes (even in the buildings it occupies), and that during Portuguese administration, separation of genders in school was the norm, with few exceptions.

Candy is no candy! The film opens with a transvestite in a shiny low-cut dress showing enhanced breasts, singing in playback. As the Narrator is attracted to Macau by a Candy, some viewers admit that Candy is that person, but no, that is Cindy Scrach who worked with these directors in Morrer como um homem.

Candy is actually named once, later in the movie, as Candida - a Portuguese name, and it's English abbreviation was deemed more appealing for the international film festivals and the world of casino's entertainment where the alleged drama takes place. Candy is presented as a McGuffin, as fake as the carved inscription in a bamboo trunk - that in closer inspection is a plank of wood shot in front of some bamboos. The end credits name Candy as an actor, and we know from interviews that it was the real name of Guerra da Mata's pet kitty - dead, and thus appearing in stock footage.

Halfway into the film the narrator comments how, after 400 years of Portuguese rule, there was no one able to speak Portuguese in Macau. Was it any different when he attended college, and lived there? His depictions of local life in Macau are stereotypical, vague, and sometimes inaccurate. I was put off by the fact that the copy of the movie shown at a special session had no subtitles for the Cantonese dialogue - adding to my rejection of the vagrant succession of images with no sense at all; but one person who speaks the language has commented that the Cantonese dialogues are unnatural and seem to be an automatic translation of English phrases. For the Portuguese dialogue, I can say that it pretends to be mysterious and suspenseful, but it never gets up from dispassionate emptiness. Old photos shown and commented out of context are part of the same emotionless and flat.

The long paintball sequence between adults, in the beginning of the film, seems so unrelated to the story as the singing act by Cindy Stein. The bird cage with a cloth covering is not a McGuffin, it's co-director João Pedro adding his life interest to be an ornithologist and bird watcher - which he should have been, instead of going to a film school.

I loved the tiger images because they are so pretty, even when they are shown torn, and abandoned, filmed after the feast ends. But not even that is there with a narrative purpose, it happens the film was shot during the Gold Tiger year (Feb 14, 2010 - Feb 2, 2011). By the way, and totally off topic, according to the Asian horoscope under this sign the males are indecisive, stubborn, and feminized.