The title Tabu is one that looms large over film history recalling the collaboration of two pillars of silent cinema, F.W. Murnau and Robert J. Flaherty, about a forbidden love story (the film's taboo) between a fisherman and a holy maid, and splits its story between two clear sections titled "Paradise" and "Paradise Lost". In Gomes' film, we begin with a prologue of a Portuguese man's expedition to Mozambique in search of his lover's soul, ending in him being devoured by alligators and being reborn as one, before moving to the first section of the film, titled "Paradise Lost". In it, we follow María, a woman activist who's neighbour with a senile lady with a gambling addiction by the name of Aurora, and her African maid Santa. Aurora is poor and raving madly about her fictitious exploits in Africa and her strange dreams of being raped by apes, all the while being suspicious of Santa, accusing her of voodoo witchcraft. Eventually the woman's health declines rapidly, and as a last wish she asks María to look for a man called Ventura. María eventually finds Ventura but is unable to bring him to Aurora before her death. After the funeral, Ventura joins with María and Santa and begins telling the story of his affair with Aurora (played by the beautiful Ana Moreira), where he confirms she did actually live in Mozambique, and where he tells of his forbidden romance with her while she was pregnant of her husband's baby. Here we begin the section titled "Paradise", detailing the story of their affair and of their Portuguese social circle, back when Mozabique was still a colony, which makes up the larger bulk of the film.
One of the aspects that surprises outright is just how brilliantly Gomes manages to capture this story from an aesthetic point of view. Visually the film is of course emulating an older style of filmmaking, right down to the choice of working in an academic ratio (1.37:1), but his visual style is perhaps less reminiscent of Murnau's, and rather seems to emulate 50s Kenji Mizoguchi and early Satyajit Ray. There is that same remarkably organic, unimposing and ever so elegant kind of black and white photography which is harder and harder to find today (even the first half which is filmed in contemporary Lisbon), all the while the film works with a very limited array of sounds and music providing a background for a story told otherwise entirely through the voice-over of Ventura.
The voice-over eventually leads to many labyrinthine stories regarding the lives of many people he met in Mozambique, not least the members of his own rock n' roll band, specifically Mario to whom Ventura was a sort of right hand man. The stories are all vivid and told with great detail and humour, but essentially they are a smokescreen to what's otherwise a very simple tragedy of forbidden love, beautifully told. In many ways, even through these many decade-spanning branches, the film's narrative closely resembles the works of Gabriel García Márquez. The love story at the heart of it is one forbidden due in large part to the social aspect, that Aurora is a pregnant, married woman, but all throughout the film there's another side suggesting the nature of this affair's forbiddance is also of a divine kind - it is, precisely, taboo. There are many elements of magical realism at play, from the cryptic opening tale to the encounters with witch-doctors and seers, the latter foreboding the tragic end to the affair. Even the location, set around a fictional Mount Tabu, and the attitude adopted by Dandy, Aurora's pet alligator, seem to plot to make their fates meet. There is a strong mystical power at play, one that, like many of Márquez's most classic works, seems to exist as an unholy hybrid between local and European beliefs product of colonization.
Evidently, this affair is doomed from the start. The inversion of the original Tabu titles, leading to an almost sardonic remark over the latter section, allows us to see and know these characters' fate before we see their relationship progress, and thus the development of their relationship is all the more arduous and cathartic.
In the Q&A with Miguel Gomes, he mentioned that he had no ulterior motives to tell this story, no overlapping ideas as he does not consider himself to be a smart man and therefore does not consider his ideas "worthy" enough to sustain a film (perhaps in admitting that he's smarter than a vast majority of the filmmakers in the BAFICI), but instead he concentrates on catching glimpses, moments and developing a story out of them. Effectively this is not a film of big ideas and enlightenment, roughly the overarching themes could be related to adultery and natural law with hints of a cultural clash and the likes, but it's never really about that. It's about creating a story that's affecting like no other, and that he's managed to create. With this, Gomes becomes a cinematic force to be reckoned with, and one I'll be following very closely from now on.
One of the aspects that surprises outright is just how brilliantly Gomes manages to capture this story from an aesthetic point of view. Visually the film is of course emulating an older style of filmmaking, right down to the choice of working in an academic ratio (1.37:1), but his visual style is perhaps less reminiscent of Murnau's, and rather seems to emulate 50s Kenji Mizoguchi and early Satyajit Ray. There is that same remarkably organic, unimposing and ever so elegant kind of black and white photography which is harder and harder to find today (even the first half which is filmed in contemporary Lisbon), all the while the film works with a very limited array of sounds and music providing a background for a story told otherwise entirely through the voice-over of Ventura.
The voice-over eventually leads to many labyrinthine stories regarding the lives of many people he met in Mozambique, not least the members of his own rock n' roll band, specifically Mario to whom Ventura was a sort of right hand man. The stories are all vivid and told with great detail and humour, but essentially they are a smokescreen to what's otherwise a very simple tragedy of forbidden love, beautifully told. In many ways, even through these many decade-spanning branches, the film's narrative closely resembles the works of Gabriel García Márquez. The love story at the heart of it is one forbidden due in large part to the social aspect, that Aurora is a pregnant, married woman, but all throughout the film there's another side suggesting the nature of this affair's forbiddance is also of a divine kind - it is, precisely, taboo. There are many elements of magical realism at play, from the cryptic opening tale to the encounters with witch-doctors and seers, the latter foreboding the tragic end to the affair. Even the location, set around a fictional Mount Tabu, and the attitude adopted by Dandy, Aurora's pet alligator, seem to plot to make their fates meet. There is a strong mystical power at play, one that, like many of Márquez's most classic works, seems to exist as an unholy hybrid between local and European beliefs product of colonization.
Evidently, this affair is doomed from the start. The inversion of the original Tabu titles, leading to an almost sardonic remark over the latter section, allows us to see and know these characters' fate before we see their relationship progress, and thus the development of their relationship is all the more arduous and cathartic.
In the Q&A with Miguel Gomes, he mentioned that he had no ulterior motives to tell this story, no overlapping ideas as he does not consider himself to be a smart man and therefore does not consider his ideas "worthy" enough to sustain a film (perhaps in admitting that he's smarter than a vast majority of the filmmakers in the BAFICI), but instead he concentrates on catching glimpses, moments and developing a story out of them. Effectively this is not a film of big ideas and enlightenment, roughly the overarching themes could be related to adultery and natural law with hints of a cultural clash and the likes, but it's never really about that. It's about creating a story that's affecting like no other, and that he's managed to create. With this, Gomes becomes a cinematic force to be reckoned with, and one I'll be following very closely from now on.