Toying with narrative form seems to be director Miguel Gomes’s forte. Our Beloved Month Of August turned the documentation of a musically inclined rural village into a humorous deconstruction the filmmaking process, never revealing what might or might not be real. With his latest, Tabu (double 2012 Berlin Film Festival winner: Alfred Bauer Award and a Fipresci award), the boundaries of reality are never breached, but the gear shifting narrative is no less inventive and quite a bit more emotionally engaging than his last go round. This time he takes us into the life of a Lisbon dwelling gambling addict retiree who’s implicit previous life in the African foot hills regarding Mount Tabu holds memories of her peak of passion and regret, but this tail, at first caustically withholding and later spryly romantic, is full of rich misdirection that deftly plays with the ideas of loyalty and repression with surprising verve.
- 11/5/2013
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
★★★★☆ The power of the lens to deconstruct colonial history is a primary concern in Miguel Gomes' third feature, Tabu (2012). Partitioned by two distinctive halves, it's a mesmeric example of how to unravel filmic modes without clogging up the narrative. The first section is set in modern day Lisbon and follows pious elderly woman Pilar (Teresa Madruga) and her concerns about neighbour Aurora (Laura Soveral), who's convinced that her African maid (Isabel Cardoso) is using voodoo against her. Pilar tracks down Ventura, a man from Aurora's past whom she once married at the foot of Africa's Mount Tabu, over 50 years prior.
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- 1/14/2013
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
As I mentioned in the preface to the first part of my Wavelengths preview (the one focusing on the short films), there are significant changes afoot in 2012. Until last year, the festival had a section known as Visions, which was the primary home for formally challenging cinema that nevertheless conformed to the basic tenets of arthouse and/or “festival” cinema (actors, scripting, 70+minute running time, and, once upon a time, 35mm presentation). This year, Wavelengths is both its former self, and it also contains the sort of work that Visions most likely would have housed. While in some respects this can seem to result in a kind of split personality for the section, it also means that Wavelengths, which has often been described as a sort of “festival within the festival,” has moved front and center. Films that would’ve occupied single slots in the older avant-Wavelengths model, like the...
- 9/12/2012
- MUBI
As festival-goers everywhere race to publish their various ‘Best of the Fest’ lists and reviews, readers will do doubt notice a trend beginning to emerge as the majority of these articles make considerable room for Miguel Gomes’ Portuguese epic, Tabu. Mine, perhaps controversially, most definitely will not.
Spread over two parts, the first, “Paradise Lost”, follows the lives of three women over the course of several months: elderly gambling addict Aurora (Laura Soveral), no-nonsense housekeeper Santa (Isabel Cardoso), and lonely landlord Pilar (Teresa Madruga), who is stood up by a deceitful prospective tenant. When Aurora takes ill and requests the presence of a previously private acquaintance, the women track down Gian Luca Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo) and drive him to the hospital at which the elderly woman is currently admitted. Along the way, he regales his escorts with the story of his and Portuguese heiress Aurora’s (played in flashback by Ana Moreira) first meeting,...
Spread over two parts, the first, “Paradise Lost”, follows the lives of three women over the course of several months: elderly gambling addict Aurora (Laura Soveral), no-nonsense housekeeper Santa (Isabel Cardoso), and lonely landlord Pilar (Teresa Madruga), who is stood up by a deceitful prospective tenant. When Aurora takes ill and requests the presence of a previously private acquaintance, the women track down Gian Luca Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo) and drive him to the hospital at which the elderly woman is currently admitted. Along the way, he regales his escorts with the story of his and Portuguese heiress Aurora’s (played in flashback by Ana Moreira) first meeting,...
- 7/4/2012
- by Steven Neish
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
In 2009, the best film in Competition at the Berlinale was Maren Ade's Everyone Else (Fwiw, it came away with 1.5 Silver Bears, the 1 for Best Actress Birgit Minichmayr, the .5 for tying with Adrián Biniez's Gigante for the Jury Grand Prix; the Golden Bear that year went to Claudia Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow). Three years on (!), the trio that made Everyone Else worth talking up to this day (see, for example, Kevin B Lee's new video essay on a key scene at Fandor; see, too, Mike D'Angelo on the same scene a year ago at the Av Club) is back in Competition, albeit in three different films. Lars Eidinger has drawn the shortest straw, taking on the lead in Hans-Christian Schmid's rather dismal Home for the Weekend. Minichmayr's fared better opposite Jürgen Vogel in Matthias Glasner's new film, though I seriously doubt many of us will...
- 2/18/2012
- MUBI
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