Tabu (Miguel Gomes) [77 points / 7 votes]
"It's been five years since we last heard from Hou Hsiao-hsien (aside from repeated assurance that a martial arts epic is on the way) and nearly as many for Tsai Ming-liang, whose great 2009 Cannes competition entry Face, a forever-ago three years in the rearview now, proved too challenging for most, evaporating altogether shortly after its festival run. This makes it look as if the grip these Taiwanese titans once had on the whole of world cinema could be loosening, and that's left a big open space for another country to claim. While both Argentina and the 'Berlin School' directors have submitted worthy resumes, it's Portugal that's proved the most compelling applicant. The country can call birthrights on the world's oldest (and arguably greatest—living) filmmaker, Manoel de Oliveira, along with a host of outlier talents (notably Pedro Costa and João Pedro Rodriguez) who've enjoyed enthusiastic acclaim in certain circles. What Portugal's lacked, however, is a kind of crossover talent, a director who can at least appeal to a broader arthouse audience, if not a mainstream one.
Portuguese former film critic and theorist Miguel Gomes never seemed like the man for this job; his first two features constituted a quasi-musical (The Face You Deserve) and a two-hour-plus freeform docudrama (Our Beloved Month of August), both considered 'deep cut' arthouse items. But the director's latest, Tabu, is a departure: It's one of the most accessible of the Great Portuguese Films. Shot entirely in black-and-white, on 35mm and Super 16 in the weirdly-popular-of-late academy ratio, and with more than half of its runtime devoid of dialogue -- a silent film but for an exquisite narration and selective foley sounds -- it wouldn't seem to be a popular favorite on its face. But then there had to be something good to come out of the existence of The Artist, and this film's relative, growing popularity seems to be it. Gomes's understanding of cinema, including his interpolation of silent film specifically, is more sophisticated than Michel Hazanavicius's generalized and annoyingly hammy tribute to the silent era. It's also, at least in one its many readings, a deeply felt romantic reverie: Gomes disguises, both sincerely and ironically, a complex evocation of national identity within the traditional bifurcated narrative of an old, white woman exoticizing her past.
Gomes draws specifically from F.W. Murnau by splitting Tabu into two sections: "Paradise Lost," then "Paradise" -- a reversal of the titles that divide Murnau's Tabu: A Story of the South Seas. (Gomes's film also pulls a lot of other elements from Murnau's, including a naturalism that tends to lead this fiction into documentary territory.) Preceding these two distinct passages is another self-contained narrative, a prologue about a melancholy European explorer who treks through the wilds of Africa, mourns his deceased lover, is taunted by visions of an ominous crocodile, and finally commits his body to the bottom of a swamp. Natives look on with expressions of bemusement and indifference... and then a reverse shot reveals that these have all been the events of a film-within-a-film. Pilar (Teresa Madruga), a solitary, middle-aged woman, is illuminated by the light of a movie theater screen, patron to a cinema in modern-day Lisbon. "Paradise Lost" begins in earnest.
Pilar soon receives a request to go and fetch her eccentric elderly neighbor, Aurora (Laura Soveral), who's stricken with dementia and prone to ruinous gambling and making up paranoid stories about her long-suffering African housekeeper, Santa (Isabel Muñoz Cardoso, the memorably murderous face that greets us in Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth). When Pilar locates her very broke neighbor, one of Tabu's two central monologues occurs: Aurora's batty account of a surrealistic dream she had, one loaded with racial shadings (the word "monkey" is repeated to an uncomfortable degree). Thereafter, Gomes devotes this first section to exploring the effects of a uniquely Portuguese condition: These characters seem to be experiencing the pangs of saudade, a sensation central to Portuguese culture (especially its art) and with no literal English translation. Loosely, the word refers to a kind of longing, but often for something that never was or could even really be defined, symptomatic of a deeply unmoored society that has suffered from something of an identity crisis since before even the Carnation Revolution. Gomes sensitively engages with these characters' melancholia, but he also gently suggests that their isolationism is their own doing. Eventually, a mysterious man from Aurora's past enters the movie and the rest of Tabu is given over to a visualization of his remembrance-cum-monologue.
The next section, "Paradise," transports us back 50 years, stylizing the events of Aurora's torrid youth spent in an unnamed African country (echoes of Claire Denis's White Material) at the base of the (fictional) Mt. Tabu as a silent movie vis-à-vis the cinephiliac Pilar's imagination. However, Gomes's intelligence again permeates and penetrates this romanticized ideal; while the young Aurora (Ana Moreia), her lover Ventura (Carloto Cotta) and the other European characters around them are all prone to expressions straight out of silent-era melodrama, the African natives and their environments are, again, depicted with a naturalism verging on docu-realism. This conscious choice registers as a sly critique of romanticized notions of colonialism and of general cultural whitewashing in cinema, but one subtle enough not to disenfranchise us from the heartfelt nature of the film's forbidden love affair.
Gomes walks a fine line, interrogating the surface pleasures of this romance with various intellectual subtexts, but the balance he strikes is pitch perfect. As frequently as he gestures toward criticism, he also invests himself in his protagonists' happiness. Aurora and Ventura, for instance, are allowed a rapturous moment of coitus; even more swooningly, most of Tabu's principals eventually come in contact with a Portuguese cover of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby." The song first appears in a film Pilar's watching and later surfaces in the "Paradise" section, strengthening the sense that what we're seeing is a kind of film of Pilar's imagining. Ventura hammers out a drum track to it when his band is off recording in a studio, far away from his beloved Aurora, tearing up throughout. Gomes does like to goof, tweaking believability and authenticity (the best joke comes when Ventura's band mimes along to another Ronettes track, "Baby, I Love You," except it's the Ramones' cover) and filtering things through Pilar's perception (hence lots of appearances of that ominous crocodile from the prologue). But he makes sure to note near the end that the peculiar outcome of Aurora and Ventura's story "sparked an uprising" in Africa.
Another joke, that -- obviously. But this particular one resonates deeply with the reflexivity that is this film's masterstroke: There are many ironies to be found throughout Tabu, but they're never condescending. Instead, they make Gomes's takes on everything from European colonialism to cinephilia to the pure pleasures of cinematic storytelling that much more rewarding, rich, and true." - Sam C. Mac
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