Tabu

This is a tough film to discuss in 500 words. It's so multifaceted, textural and moody. I'll try my hardest, but from the off, I must suggest that you just experience Tabu for yourself. You may have a different experience or opinion to me, you may feel the exact same. Either way, you won't regret it.

Borrowing the name, two-part structure and love affair-plus-colonisation premise from F.W. Murnau's 1931 classic, Miguel Gomes' Tabu is a film of unmistakable vintage. But it's magnificently subversive too. With one foot in the past, one in the future and a head orbiting in it's own artistic universe, it's a little thing of beguiling beauty.

Tabu opens with a tragicomic prologue centring around an exasperated explorer trekking through the harsh jungles of Southern Africa. Through Gomes' voice-over narration, we learn that he is distraught over the death of his wife some years ago, and this lost adventure will be his last. No crocodile tears on display, but there is an ominous little croc that lingers through the sequence - and the rest of the film - with cold, mournful eyes. In a word, stunning.

From here, we begin with the chapter "A LOST PARADISE". In something that resembles a present day Lisbon, we meet our leading lady Aurora (Laura Soveral). A compulsive gambler whose memories are slipping away from her, yet images of hairy monkeys and African farmers still manage to pervade her dreams. Whilst she tries to recall her youth with altruistic next-door-neighbour Pilar (Teresa Madruga) and Santa (Isabel Cardoso), a black woman whom Aurora often woefully calls a housemaid/tyrannous witch, the fatalism of the prologue suggests that Aurora will only be able to relive her glory days in the afterlife.

Cue part 2, "PARADISE". Told through vivid flashbacks and narration from former lover Gian- Luca Venture, we're finally made aware of Aurora's past once lost. Married to a wealthy farmer in the idyllic rural setting of Mozambique, Aurora embarks on a fiery affair with the devilishly handsome nomad Ventura, after her eager pet crocodile crossed the forbidden line into his neighbouring garden. It's a time of lost innocence and furtive whispers, so Gomes decides to strip away all forms of diegetic sound, leaving just the bodies and faces of incredible actors Ana Moreira and Carloto Cotta to express this simple, enduring love.

Like Leos Carax's comeback success Holy Motors, Tabu is a film entrenched in film history and scholarly technique (unsurprising considering that they both started out as film critics). But Gomes goes one step further. Filmed in intoxicating black & white by cinematographer Rui Poças, Tabu is beautifully photographed; from the alarmingly stark opening image of a sweaty explorer looking lost in an African jungle, to the final image of a baby crocodile turning away from the camera and crawling out of frame. In an inspired touch, the two halves are filmed in different film stocks – the first in familiar 35mm, and the second in exquisitely old-fashioned 16mm. They mingle together to create a film with a perennial quality, existing as a piece of cinematic artifice but with a modern, reflexive twist.

Similarly, the sound construction is unnervingly good. Mixing the deadened silence with ambient sounds, poetic narration and a Portuguese rendition of "Be My Little Baby" (made famous by The Ronettes) the composite sonisphere speaks for the unspoken, tabooed love to exceptionally powerful effect.

Because the film's aesthetic is so dazzling, it's easy to lose track of the whimsical storyline. Based on diary entries and private letters, it has a very nostalgic feel, similar to Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. Just like that film, Tabu isn't a perfect movie, there's pacing issues and Gomes seems to be wrestling with three separate endings. But there's enough moments of unforgettable virtuosity, grace and intellect to make Tabu unmissable.

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A KVIFF viewing, the third feature-length work from Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, which was among the contenders for the Golden Bear in Berlin earlier this year, and wound up winning the FIPRESCI Prize and Alfred Bauer Award.

The film is entirely in Black & White, which has a deceiving anachronism effect and injects an appeasing vigor to enliven the storyline. With being equally divided into two parts, the first half is the contemporary story between a middle-aged woman, Pillar and her senior neighbor Aurora (who is live alone with her black servant Santa, and strongly believes her estranged daughter and Santa are plotting against her); the second half is completely B&W silent, with an elaborate voice-over from Aurora's former lover Ventura, revealing a secret history about he and Aurora's love affair back in Africa half an century ago. It is a distinctively interesting composition, which contributes a pleasant illusion that we were watching a double-feature.

But by comparison, the first part is more austere and compelling while the second part is basically about a superfluously hackneyed liaison between a married woman and a romantic womanizer, the only worthiness is that it is between two white people in Africa, and if one intends to get some in-depth probe about the continent and its people, the film could hardly suffices this curiosity.

Between the female correlation in the first part, Pilar has a manifest momentum to propel the storyline, and ruefully there will not be a third paragraph to recount her story out of the lightly over-hyped second part, her story behind might own more worth to be revisited and explored. Teresa Madruga and Laura Soveral are spellbinding during their screen time, if only the second half could be reinterpreted in another way, the film could have been a fabulous essay about love, aging and mystery behind everyone's usual representation.

Young Portuguese director Miguel Gomes plunges us into two narratives that are nothing less than pure poetry.

The screenplay and refined narration, the delicate but still frenetic soundtrack that dances through Joana Sá's piano keyboards, the contrasting photography (not new, not old), as well as the roaming melancholy of Lisbon and Africa's landscapes, drive us to a distant, dream-like, almost abstracted dimension.

"Tabu" is truly a cinematic synesthesia, an artistic portrait that, inexplicably, grabs its viewers from the first minute. A genuine pearl that will endure in our thoughts for quite some time. A triumph.

8/10

This is pretty astounding stuff. How apt and special, that so soon after the untimely passing of Raoul Ruiz, another director in the Hispanic world (that includes Portugal and the colonies) announces himself as a bright new voice with this great work? And in the same vein of multilateral realities blurring memory with storytelling as Ruiz. It's almost perfectly metaphysical, and in line with the phenomenon of recent interesting Hispanic filmmakers. Medem, Martel, and now this guy.

Before we get to that, I'd like to say about this that it achieves by far one of the most important aspects in a film—it takes place in a profoundly characteristic world of its own, I expect I will be haunted for months by its sultry, languorous Africa. The atmosphere is one of mysterious beauty, waiting and sexual lassitude. The film has textures, smells. The sound work is perfectly sculpted. The camera is sometimes in Antonioni's turf of spatial meditation, sometimes in Herzog's found ecstasy, sometimes in Chris Marker's visual letters from memory.

So the fabric of the film is exceptional, that alone would be enough to earn an enthusiastic recommendation from me, but that is the basis for some pretty cool narrative threads, all pointing to storytelling as maps to the life behind the fabric of illusions.

The typical reading of the film is that split in two segments, 'Lost Paradise' and 'Paradise', we have an emotionally shattered old woman, and her backstory of much erotic exploration and tragic heartbreak in faraway Mozambique that explains who she was.

It is more interesting than that. The second part which is by far the most captivating, is a story an old friend tells of her, and as he tells it, he tells a million other stories, about friends, rock'n'roll frolicking, crocodiles as passion, boxing invisible enemies, jungle monsters and anticolonial revolution. As he tells it, some of the puzzling obsessions of the delusional old woman we've known begin to make sense, her worry for a loose crocodile, apprehension of witchcraft and impassioned plea of having blood on her hands. Her ravings had basis after all, it matters that they are illusory images transmuted from actual events.

Now if you go back to the first segment, you will see that a recurring notion is how something may be imagined-imaginary, but the images can perturb or affect reality—see this in the old woman's dream of gambling that propels her to gamble the next day, in the catacomb imagined to be Roman, in the co-worker's talk of mass susceptibility.

Isn't this why cinema can work at all? Love?

The framing device is a film that Pilar is watching in the cinema, the film is about an 'intrepid and melancholic explorer' in the African savanna who is haunted by visions of his dead wife. They all are intrepid explorers of course, bringing images to life, as are we venturing in the shared journey of exploring the old woman.

This device comes first in the film, but it could be taking place at any time. Pilar is the main character of the first segment, but we know close to nothing of her, except that she is melancholic, lonely and wants to be of help—we learn she is an activist, she arranges for a Polish girl to stay with her but the girl never shows up. To emphasize her solitude, it's the New Year's Eve in Lisbon which she spends crying in a theater.

And she is staying next to an old woman (she is not getting younger herself), who is losing it and near the end, 'dying'. So who is imagining from the old woman's ravings a life of excitement and escape into scorching faraway heat?

Martel has even more submerged narrative in this mode. But this is too good to pass—this guy shows mastery in creating a cinematic aura and he gets how a story can be about blowing glass into the air of story to give us reflective shapes about the urges.

(if readers can help with contact info for the filmmaker let me know)

Tabu is exactly the type of poetic old-fashioned film I adore. It's a simple story told very unconventionally, with the long slow death of a character in the first half (entitled "Paradise Lost") and then the best years of her life in the second ("Paradise") to the point of where the aforementioned Paradise came to an end. The aesthetics of the film are the real highlight here and truly capture the essence of the story in a unique way. The lush texture in the rich black and white photography are a delight to watch, and recall the effects Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man's cinematography had with the ethereal, sometimes tragic and sometimes comic atmosphere it created. The timeless cinematography is also reminiscent of the 1920s studio films with manufactured exterior shots and the use of a traditional 1.37:1 ratio. There's a fascinating use of sound too, with the second half being dialogue-less, despite watching characters talk, and featuring only atmosphere sounds of the jungle. There's also a great use of a Ronettes song that I love ostensibly translated into Portuguese. Tabu is a majestic film that had a profound effect on me. It's an interesting take on the long term consequence of a 'taboo' (in this case, adultery). One of the best of the year.

9/10