It’s tough to suppress the hyperbole when discussing Tabu, the beguiling new film from Portuguese visionary (see!) Miguel Gomes, which played in competition at this year’s Berlinale. It’s a film which possesses the innate ability to send regular orgasmic shivers down the spine, and this becomes evident from the Chopin-esque piano scales that drift on to the soundtrack and over the title credits. Sometimes it’s something as simple as a composition, a visual stress or a line of dialogue. But as a film of blissful, life-affirming ‘moments’, one might be inclined to view it as 2012’s droll and heady response to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.
It opens on a vignette about a melancholy, pith-helmeted explorer marching across “the black continent” and being haunted by the ghost of his late wife who has taken the form of a crocodile. Over the course of 110 minutes, the significance of this tale will gradually come to light.
Gomes’ potential for concocting the cinematic sublime was already evident in his 2008 work, Our Beloved Month of August, a rustic, laid-back slice of intertextual doc-fiction fusion which felt as earthy and sincere as it did intellectually rigourous and formally enterprising. With Our Beloved Month of August, Gomes proved himself a director who used film to fold time and space back in on itself, to furtively implant the psychogeorgraphic details and local anecdotes of a place (here, it was rural Portugal) into the viewers’ mind and then revisit them later in an entirely new and exciting context.
Tabu is structurally similar to Our Beloved Month in that it can initially be viewed as a diptych feature with two distinctive yet (eventually) complementary storylines. The first chapter is titled ‘Paradise Lost’ and involves a do-gooding, emotionally-guarded Catholic woman named Pilar living alone in a flat in the Lisbon suburbs. She’s having a relationship with a talkative amateur artist and regularly weeps at the cinema. Her neighbour is the fallen and possible demented grand dame, Miss Aurora, who is cared for by a Cape Verdian housemaid, Santa.
Photographed in evocative, low-contrast monochrome, this is a glum, depressed Lisbon of disappointment and dashed dreams, entirely devoid in passion, adventure and music. Santa escapes the drudgery of her existence through the pages of ‘Robinson Crusoe’. When Miss Aurora passes away clutching a note to a mysterious man, Pilar tracks him down in order to hear his story, its telling encompasses the second half of the film which is entitled ‘Paradise’.
It’s in this half where Gomes’ allusion to FW Murnau and his Bora-Bora-set romance from 1931 becomes apparent. This second tale – magically constructed in identical style to Murnau’s swansong, employing musical cues and diegetic sound but no actual dialogue (a narration is intoned by Miss Aurora’s mystery acquaintance) – is where the film evolves from intriguing, possibly inscrutable oddity to an enchanting, harrowing and hilarious melodrama about memory, cinema, colonialisation and insanity. Filmed in Mozambique (a location that is left unnamed in the film), Gomes forges this rapturous fever dream in the exact manner in which its tragic players remember it: as a piece of silent cinematic.
It’s hard to discuss Tabu’s masterful evocation of the silent medium without ushering in Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist as a point of comparison. Tabu ingeniously intimates that our memory is essentially cinematic in nature and that we remember events as fragments of film. The Artist, one feels, is merely a case of mercurial, surface-level nostalgia. Gomes appears to suggest that it’s a facet of human nature to romanticise the drama of our own lifetimes and that mundane events from our past can seem all the more attractive, affecting and profound when filtered through time and perception. Tabu addresses nothing less than the essence of imagination and memory. One could even read it as a film about psychoanalysis, as it runs with the idea that we grow to become the tragic product of our formative memories.
The story of Miss Aurora, its exotic setting and her illicit affair with the drummer of louche lounge combo (Mario’s Band, named after its singer) calls to mind not just Murnau’s euphoric dissections of amour fou (Tabu, but Sunrise also), but films like John Ford’s Mogambo and its antecedent, Red Dust by Victor Fleming. The style of the film is also satisfyingly arch and literate, allying it to the modernist primitivism of directors like Manoel de Oliveira, Eugene Green and Straub-Huillet. And yet, Tabu manages to transcend its myriad influences and reference points, particularly in the way that it’s a very approachable film despite its intricate, multi-layered structure.
As a writer, Gomes displays a very appealing and idiosyncratic interest in folklore and social history, especially when it comes to creating his own apocryphal tall tales. The world of Tabu accounts for the unreliability of memory, and this history is dashed with anachronisms and temporal slights of hand. Despite the suggestion, via the silent milieu, that we’re in the ’30s or ’40s, Aurora’s attire figure-hugging slacks definitely hark from the ’60s, and the repertoire of Mario’s Band includes The Ramones’ Spector-fied cover of ‘Baby I Love You’. But what makes Tabu’s time-spanning romance so authentic is that the characters and their motivations are believable and heartfelt, despite the wacky world they inhabit.
Tabu’s greatness cannot be properly gauged from a single sitting, though the feeling is that it will only gain depth and richness on second, third and fourth viewings. At Berlin, it’s stratospheres ahead of the competition, and one feels that Mike Leigh and his jury would be making a terrible blunder not to recognise Gomes’ wild genius. We shall see.
For more information on this year’s Berlinale visit berlinale.de
Berlin International Film Festival 2012 – Round Up: Day 5 (text) by David Jenkins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
