Miguel Gomes - Tabù (2012)

Crno-bijeli, gotovo nijemi film o tri žene i melankoličnom krokodilu u kontekstu konolijalizma - izvrsno polazište. A dalje... tek treba vidjeti.

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Miguel Gomes' 'Tabu' Delivers a Brilliantly Poetic Look at Colonialism, But What's With the Crocodiles?

by Eric Kohn

"Tabu."

A head-scratchingly lyrical immersion into colonialist metaphor and historical memory, Portuguese director Miguel Gomes' third feature "Tabu" reaches for the dreamlike experiences of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's oeuvre with a bold structure that defies genre specifics. At the same time, for all its confusing and erratic qualities, Gomes ("Our Beloved Month of August") has made a decisively cinematic work, tapping into classic film traditions while subverting them with consistent narrative invention.
Not to be confused with the F.W. Murnau movie of the same name, "Tabu" nonetheless borrows the expressionistic style of the earlier film's period, using luxurious black-and-white photography to alternately drain the life out of a boring world and transcend it with the magic realism of the alternate reality that eventually takes over. Gomes breaks his movie into two very different parts: The first, entitled "A Lost Paradise," serves as an unsuspecting introduction to the second half, when it launches to another plane.
But first the easy stuff: Middle-aged Lisbon resident Pilar (Teresa Madruga) takes an interest in the final days of her apartment neighbor Aurora (Laura Soveral), an elderly woman suffering from a gambling addiction. In the wake of her death, Pilar discovers letters in the late woman's home that reveal an epic love affair from her murky past, at which point the movie flashes back for its second part, "Paradise." But "flashback" doesn't quite describe the abrupt shift to storybook romanticism that defines the rest of the running time, when "Tabu" essentially becomes a silent film exclusively narrated by Aurora's lover but otherwise containing no spoken dialogue.
However, the surreal place where the majority of the story unfolds doesn't exactly come out of nowhere. A hypnotic introductory segment set in Africa immediately sets "Tabu" apart. In the opening minutes, an "intrepid explorer" roams the jungle while a narrator (Gomes) explains the man's dire need to escape the reality of his wife's death. Tortured by her phantom at every turn, he eventually reaches his own fate at the jaws of a crocodile. That's the movie in a nutshell: "Tabu" contains a lot of crocodiles of various shapes and sizes, shimmying through the tragic romance at the heart of the picture like a reptilian Greek chorus.
With its clever use of nature to service an elusive agenda, "Tabu" calls to mind Weerasethakul's "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," but mostly it exists in a world apart from anything else. In the flashback, young Aurora (Ana Moreira), the aimless daughter of an accomplished hunter, winds up in an awkward love triangle with her affluent husband (Ivo Muller) and the dashing traveler Gian Luca Ventura (Carloto Cotta), with whom she engages in a passionate affair. Gian Luca brings a friend in tow whose band frequently serenades them in their posh mansion, while an army of servants attend to every need.
The situation builds to a curiously insightful representation of French colonialist misdeeds, but plays hide-and-seek with its deeper themes, sometimes pitting the conceptual aspirations against the possibility of emotional payoff. But even when it favors the cerebral approach, the spectacle maintains its allure. Gian Luca, whose poetic voiceover dominates the movie, bemoans "the despairing impasse of my situation," a verbose complaint that Gomes complements in visual terms. The director both embraces colonialist fantasies while hinting at their dark side. No matter how deep you dig for answers, "Tabu" delivers that much in a perfectly tangible fashion, ending on a note both supremely gorgeous and dangerously remote.

Three women, a crocodile, and a farm in Africa

by Bénédicte Prot

 
In the style of a colonial film from the 1960s shot in 16mm, the prologue of Tabu [trailer, film focus] by Portuguese director Miguel Gomes (Our Beloved Month of August [trailer]) tells of how a crocodile became inconsolable after having gobbled up an explorer tragically in love, and already in this beginning we see all the ingredients of this delicious film: its grain, its choice of black and white, its themes, its intelligence, its love of film, and finally its slap-stick humour that always wants to suddenly impose grotesque elements in situations initially approached as tragedies.

The first part of the film, named “Lost Paradis”, is set today and revolves around three elderly neighbours whose names suit them: there is the pious and charitable Pilar (Teresa Madruga), whom can be counted on to pay attention and to come running when she is needed, the devoted Santa (Isabel Cardoso), a woman of colour probably originally from a Portuguese colony who lets herself be treated as a housemaid when she is not being accused of witchcraft or tyranny, and the widow and and abandoned mother Aurora (Laura Soveral), towards the end of her life. It is especially Aurora that the two others always have to come to the rescue of, as she ruins herself in casinos, drawn there by strange dreams populated by hairy monkeys - an irresistable call even if she is aware that dreams and reality are two different things, for if she weren’t it would be different. When she is urgently taken to hospital, not before having asked Santa to look after the crocodile, she utters her wish to see a certain Gian Luca before she dies. (When Santa asks which crocodile, she says the question is absurd because there aren’t fifteen of them!)
In the second half of the film, we set off on an adventure 50 years before with Mr Ventura, him also very well named, in the farm that the departed Aurora used to own in Africa at the foot of a certain Mount Tabu. In this paradise, Aurora (who, young, has the delightful features of Ana Moreira) lives a very dreamy reality. This is shown through silent images, with the exception of the jolly musical passages that retrace her incredible biography, to the voice of our narrator (played in his youth by the devastating Carloto Cotta, with his Gérard Philippe moustache). However, as this very colourful black-and-white story carries on, we discover why the young woman who exported ostrich feathers, briefly became an actress, and was a dedicated hunter of large game, had to give up this idyllic life to forever keep with her the secret of a tragic love story, like a large crocodile at the bottom of her heart.
Whereas the endearing The Artist [trailer, film focus] continues to conquer Mount Hollywood, Tabu deploys its roots it a whole new type of earth to give silent cinema the most authentic of tributes, because the film does not parody silent cinema but rather captures its spirit. In short, Tabu infinite originality strikes you from the very beginning. Gomes’ film does not resemble anything recent in cinema, nor anything else for that matter.

 

 

The entrancing new film by Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes (Our Beloved Month of August) travels from a modern "Paradise Lost" to an exotic, magical "Paradise" as it intertwines a chronicle of illicit love with a sly overview of Portugal's colonial history.

Following the acclaimed Our Beloved Month of August, Miguel Gomes now firmly establishes himself as one of the major talents in contemporary world cinema with his entrancing third feature. Named after F.W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty’s 1931 classic, Tabu is an intoxicating mix of formal daring, political commentary, haunting romance and exquisite beauty. Filmed in black and white, and divided into two parts — "Paradise Lost," set in the present and filmed in 35mm, followed by an extended flashback to the bygone "Paradise," rendered in beautifully grainy Super 16mm — Tabu intertwines a chronicle of illicit love with a subtle overview of Portugal’s colonial history and its reverberations in the present.
In "Paradise Lost," we first encounter Aurora (Laura Soveral) as a mildly batty elderly woman living in modern-day Lisbon. She spends her days exhausting her savings on gambling binges and alienating her steadfast Cape Verdean housekeeper Santa (Isabel Cardoso) by accusing her of witchcraft — a bit of knee-jerk racism that serves as a reminder of Portugal’s colonial hangover. When Aurora is hospitalized, she confides to Pilar (Teresa Madruga), her kindly, lonesome middle-aged neighbour and seemingly only friend, the name and address of a man whom she wants to know of her fate: Gian Luca Ventura.
In contrast to Aurora’s unceasing chattiness in "Paradise Lost," "Paradise" is marked by a total absence of dialogue. This shift is a nod to early cinema, but the roots of "Paradise" reach back further, into the magic of oral storytelling. Narrated by the now elderly Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), the film’s second part takes place fifty years in the past, where a much younger and happier Aurora (Ana Moreira) is married, affluent and pregnant, living on a large African estate with a battalion of black servants and hosting garden parties where alcohol and firearms are always handy. Life seems to promise only pleasant placidity — until Aurora falls hopelessly in love with the handsome, moustachioed drummer Ventura (Carloto Cotta), whose band specializes in Portuguese versions of Phil Spector hits. Running away into the wilderness at the foothills of Mount Tabu, the lovers play out their illicit affair under the eyes of a watchful, mystical crocodile.
A colonialist metaphor wrapped in a gloriously cinephilic fever dream, Tabu delivers one of the year’s most rapturous love letters to the cinema.- Diana Sanchez
 

Film Review: 'Tabu'

Easily one of the strongest films on display at this year's icy Berlin Film Festival and a firm contender for best feature of 2012 so far, Portuguese director Miguel Gomes (perhaps best-known on these shores for his previous film, 2008's This Dear Month of August) returns triumphantly with Tabu (2012). A beguiling black and white drama that spans both decades and continents, this is mesmeric, conscientious filmmaking at its most ambitious and expansive.

Knowingly named after German expressionist F. W. Murnau's Bora Bora-based classic Tabu (1931), Gomes' acclaimed third feature film divides its time between two complementary storylines - one set in Lisbon, the other set out in the wilds of Africa. Residing in a Lisbon tower block, the eccentric Aurora (played by both Laura Soveral and Ana Moreira) lives out her twilight years with her trusted African maid Santa (Isabel Cardoso) perpetually at her side, haunting memories of the past seemingly hanging on the other.

When Aurora is admitted to hospital, kindly next-door neighbour Miss Pilar (Teresa Madruga) takes it upon herself to uncover the melancholies that have blighted our protagonist's later life. Pilar uncovers a long-lost love affair between Aurora and a mysterious Italian suitor, whom she courted beneath the shadows of Mount Tabu in Africa. Gomes creates a clear distinction between the two time frames with exemplary use of both 35mm and 16mm film - with the results simply sumptuous.
Whilst Gomes' Tabu is by no means a mere pastiche, one can't help but but be taken with this unashamedly nostalgic slice of arthouse cinema. Murnau comparisons are no mere hyperbole, and whilst Michel Hazanavicius' Oscar-winning The Artist (2011) paid homage to the kings and queens of Hollywood's silent era, Gomes here lauds a number of past European masters - whilst putting forward a very strong case for his own future inclusion. The colonialist allure of Africa - a continent so rarely muted in monochrome, yet so eternally vivid and vibrant all the same - calls not only to the fading Aurora but also directly to the film's audience. There is almost a sense that Henry Morton Stanley could appear at any time, uttering the immortal line: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" - an Africa of cinematic myth, rather than fact.
Utilising its different stocks and locations to devastating effect, Gomes creates that rare thing - an experimental arthouse effort with (in its narrative at least) genuine mainstream appeal. Sadly, there seems little danger of Tabu troubling some of the week's larger releases, but the touch paper of fervent critical acclaim has already been lit. Say hello to your new favourite auteur. - Daniel Green

Tabu, Miguel Gomes

Past and present merge in this tale of love, memory and a melancholy crocodile

by Jonathan Romney

Until recently, there was no doubt about the top positions in my list of Greatest Animals in Art Cinema – the anarchic goats in Le Quattro Volte, and the "deranged penguin" encountered in the Antarctic by Werner Herzog. Now there's a serious challenger for Best of Bestiary: the "sad and melancholy crocodile" from the wonderfully strange Portuguese film Tabu.

This baleful creature first makes its appearance in the prologue, an eerie anecdote about a depressed European explorer in Africa. But the tale, narrated in lugubrious voice-over, turns out to be part of an old black and white film watched in a Lisbon cinema by a middle-aged woman named Pilar (Teresa Madruga). What follows, still in gorgeously shot black and white, is Pilar's story – until it takes a left turn and becomes something else again.
Tabu premiered in this year's Berlin Film Festival, where critics emerged with smiles of rapturous bewilderment. At the risk of spoiling the surprise, I'd have to describe Tabu as a diptych: two quite different stories with a unifying aesthetic and sense of humour. The first 50 minutes tell the downbeat story of Pilar, who lives alone but has a close friend, and seemingly unrequited suitor, in an elderly artist whose abstract canvases she hangs on her walls out of consideration for him – although her own taste is for cosy rural panoramas. She's politically motivated, attending rallies and scanning human rights abuses online. And she's solicitous towards her elderly neighbour Aurora (Laura Soveral), a rather grand lady developing dementia and proving the despair of her maid Santa (Isabel Cardoso). In one extraordinary scene, Aurora explains at length why she's gambled her money away at a casino: because of a bizarre dream about monkeys.
Pilar's story is recounted in a lyrical, hangdog manner: in two very funny, but also rather sad scenes, Pilar meets a young Polish nun who's supposed to be staying with her, but who proves totally unreliable (and who's clearly no nun, either).
Then comes another story altogether, about Aurora's youth, narrated in voice-over by a dapper old gent who was once her lover. It's set in the early 1960s, somewhere in Africa, on the slopes, we're told, of Mount Tabu. Imagine Anna Karenina rewritten à la Ernest Hemingway as the tale of a plantation owner's spoilt wife (Ana Moreira as the young Aurora) and a dashing adventurer, their torrid affair sparked by the incident of an escaped crocodile.
The romance of Aurora and Ventura (Carloto Cotta) could be another ancient movie melodrama, like the one that opens the film – or perhaps this is just how film-lover Pilar imagines the story as it's narrated to her. But Tabu isn't a straight pastiche of silent cinema. For one thing, Miguel Gomes plays fast and loose with his soundtrack, erasing people's voices (their lips move, but we never hear them), while being selective about background sounds. In one scene, people dive into a swimming pool, but we never hear a splash, although we do hear birdsong.
Then there's the music. Improbably, Ventura moonlights as a drummer in the beat group led by his sidekick Mario (Manuel Mesquita), a student priest turned crooner; at a pool party, they're seen miming to the Phil Spector classic "Baby I Love You" – only it's the 1980 cover by the Ramones (complete with a string section that's certainly nowhere to be seen).
The African story, with crocodiles slithering enigmatically in and out, has a tragic outcome, and it's a rare feat on Gomes's part that he persuades us to take it seriously, for all the surrounding eccentricity.
Tabu's overall meaning may be elusive, but there's clearly a political subtext at work. While the Europeans in the love story are stock figures, the Africans – though the narrative keeps them purely as background figures – are clearly real Africans, living in the 21st century. Among the beautiful landscape shots are scenes of village life and rural work that have a documentary texture. And the upshot of Aurora's romance is that it sparks an uprising.
You can read Tabu as a story about love, memory and melancholy; as a rueful contemplation of Portugal's colonial history; or as a delirious celebration of story and the cinematic imagination. It is all of these, and in its delicate, even rather shy way, it's the most joyously odd and surprising film of the year. It would take a truly reptilian soul not to love it.

 

 

Miguel Gomes

We asked Miguel Gomes, director of SFF Official Competition film Tabu, to answer a few questions about his film, a highly original romantic drama set in both present-day Lisbon and a semi-mythical colonial Africa. Gomes will appear at the festival for the screenings of his acclaimed film.
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How old were you when you knew you wanted to be a filmmaker? And was there a particular film or filmmaker that inspired this decision?
Not old enough. There were many films and filmmakers involved, so I'll not mention them so I'm held responsible for any unacceptable exclusions.
Describe your first experience with filmmaking.
It felt good. It was a bad film though; I think I do a better job nowadays.
Can you tell us about the genesis of Tabu?
It came from everywhere; I cannot be precise as to the moment things glued together and gave birth to a film. There were stories from neighbours, there were songs I'd heard and there was the desire of filming certain things, people and places. There was also the recollections of seeing silent films and Tarzan movies.
Please describe your film for us?
I can't do it. If you can do it, it must be a very bad film or a masterpiece; maybe my film is neither one of those. Nowadays I think my film has something to do with time and memory. But when I started it I don't think I had it that clearly, I'm not that smart.
Tell us a little bit about your film's cast.
Professional Portuguese actors mixed with people from the crew (who I think make good actors). As my idea of the script was very open to the experience of the shooting, I'd make up new scenes during the shooting and my technicians were prepared to play characters at any moment. The main actors were very generous because they didn't have a script; we were making it up in Mozambique every day.
Which parts of the filmmaking process do you enjoy the most? The least?
The shooting is perhaps the most important moment. I don't separate that much the different moments of the production. I can start editing in between different phases of the shooting, or I can write during the editing (the voiceover of Tabu was made that way). The least enjoyable moment is the one that doesn't involve me: waiting for funding.
Which films and directors do you think have most influenced this film?
Tabu is a stolen title from a film by F. W. Murnau. Though I think it's not Murnau's work I'm searching for, but a wider and more vague sensation of an extinguished cinema that could be symbolized by Murnau's work.
What is the best piece of professional advice you've ever been given, and who gave it to you?
Don't put your own money into the making of a film or you will lose it (cinema school in Lisbon, first lesson).
How important it is to you that your film receives festival exposure?
The film had its premiere at Berlin and was seen by many people. That contributed to it being bought by distant countries - like for instance Australia.
When audiences in Sydney leave the cinema after watching Tabu what do you hope they will be thinking or feeling?
People are free to think whatever they want to think, which is from my point of view one of the most beautiful things in the world. As a viewer, I can get really angry when a film is imposing something on me. I want to get there (or not) on my own.
What are you most looking forward to about your upcoming trip to Sydney?
Visiting the city. Sydney seems quite exciting from the pictures. - http://www.sff.org.au/public/events/miguel-gomes/

Interview: Miguel Gomes, director of 'Tabu'

This Friday sees the UK cinema release of Miguel Gomes' bewitching black and white master-stroke Tabu (2012). We met up with Gomes at the Edinburgh International Film Festival earlier this year to discuss the film and his own nostalgic approach to cinema further. An ex-film critic known for his playful personality, it would be fair to say that Gomes is quite an intimidating subject to interview. However, his passion for the medium is almost unparalleled, conveyed with remarkable eloquence and passion.
We began by talking about the influences behind Tabu. "People say to me there is such an irony in the film about the colonisation issue, whilst others say you're so nostalgic about cinema, and I say to both of them, you're correct." A wry smile graces his face: "I like that I can be at the same times ironic and completely into the message of the film." Gomes purposes that "cinema is like a battery, you must have a negative and positive pole to create energy." When asked to elaborate he continues: "The main issue of this film is structured around loneliness in the first part and passion in the second."
The issue of colonialism provokes a more provocative response: "I always wanted to depict Portugal's identity, I wanted to explore it not in an historical way but in a much more meteorological way." However, Gomes was keen to explain that he personally only knew Africa from the movies he watched growing up: "This Africa, comes from my film knowledge not personal experiences. It's Africa built through a cinematic perspective - an abstract territory."
When then asked about Gomes had found working in Africa he humorously replied by illuminating the difficulties of creating a ‘'realistic' portrait of the continent in the sixties: "I had ten white guys to make a film set in Africa, I asked every male member of the crew to grow a moustache because I thought it would be more impressive." And how did they reacted to such a peculiar demand? A melancholic look arises from his face: "Well some of them betrayed me, they shaved them off during the shooting, it was a disgrace!"
Much like in his previous film, 2008's This Dear Month of August, music played a big part for Gomes in Tabu. "I love music" he proclaims. "I always try to have things I like in my films". Gomes continues: "I try to put things like music, or people doing things I like to do in there." His answer is interrupted slightly as we seek to enquire about the film's iconic, melancholic crocodile. "I love crocodiles! People ask me 'Why a crocodile?', and I didn't have a rational answer. However, I started to understand it more after I answered a similar question by saying that they look very prehistoric, so maybe they are so old that they remember the things that people may have forgotten."
We conclude the interview by asking what we should expect next from Gomes. He answers sheepishly: "I'm trying to write another feature. I have very specific idea, but what I know from making films is that my starting point is so different from the finished product that I don't want you to accuse me of being a liar..." Either way, whatever comes next from Gomes is bound to be met with the highest level of anticipation. - www.cine-vue.com

Director Miguel Gomes on Tabu

Tabu, directed by Miguel Gomes, 2012 Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’ new film Tabu opens with the tale of an intrepid explorer. Unable to escape the ghost of his widow, who keeps appearing no matter how far he treks through the heart of Africa, he throws himself to the crocodiles in desperation. Afterwards, many swear to have seen a melancholic crocodile accompanying a lady from times gone by. While not directly tied to the plot that follows, this little film-within-a-film introduces the exotic romance and ironic absurdity that counter-balance Tabu, in which the heart is the most dangerous, uncontrollable force there is, and in which time condemns us to loss and nostalgia.
“It’s almost Gothic; it’s not a thing of nowadays,” said Gomes of this opening tale, when AnOther met with him in London. The rest of the film, he said, “is a way to get us there; to this doomed love that travels through time.”
In the first part (Paradise Lost) we’re in present-day Lisbon – a place of uneasy ineffability. The elderly Aurora is under the eye of her neighbour Pilar, who is concerned she’s slipping into senility (gambling all her money away at the casino, ranting about blood on her hands and making wild witchcraft accusations against her maid). On being hospitalised, she hands Pilar a slip of paper with an address, begging her to summon a man called Gian Luca Ventura. When he arrives, the film jumps back in time for part two (Paradise) – and from 35mm to luminous 16mm – as Ventura narrates the tale of his youthful, illicit love affair with Aurora in a Portuguese colony in Africa.
For all the film’s tricky construction and self-conscious irony, its enchantment is in the vivid, raw desire captured in its second part – all the more strongly because we know it’s now gone. “It’s about things that disappear,” said the director. “All this melancholy comes through, because you see young bodies but an old voice telling the story. They’re young people doing sexy things like in a Hollywood film but at the same time they are ghost people that are already dead, or about to die.”

"They’re young people doing sexy things like in a Hollywood film but at the same time they are ghost people that are already dead..."

The image of the melancholy crocodile was prompted by this nostalgia for bygone moments. “Crocodiles look very ancient; they seem as if they come from prehistoric times,” said Gomes. “As they are so old they must remember things that people have now forgotten. There is a connection between this crocodile and time and memory: the memory of lovers that get together and break up; and of colonial empires that are built and fall down. Nature is like a witness to all the craziness of the heart.”
Gomes shot the second part in a remote location in Mozambique – and recalled that the real reptiles used had been privy to the inexplicable side of human behaviour. “One of the few white people there was this very strange priest that looked a little like he was out of Apocalypse Now or something. He was in charge of some black kids, and had built a fortress; he had Doberman dogs, lots of guns, a coffin in his bedroom and snakes inside. We thought he was creepy and not very trustworthy, but we still borrowed his crocodiles.”
While the film treats the delusion of a colonial paradise ironically, Gomes says he was determined to be honest with the characters’ passions at the same time: “I didn’t want to betray them; to condemn them for living in this regime. I think cinema is connected like a battery, with its negative and opposite positive terminal. If you have irony and in the same amount passion toward the emotions of the characters, then there is electricity.”
Tabu's title and its two part construction reference and invert the structure of F. W. Murnau’s 1931 split-chapter film of the same name, also about two fated lovers in a far-flung colony. But for Gomes, the use of this highly inventive curio is not so much designed to imitate the earlier classic but rather to recapture past cinematic magic: “Murnau for me stands as a symbol for silent film and cinema in general - the idea of how cinema can get you to another place.”
Tabu is released in the UK on September 7. - Text by Carmen Gray 

Tabu: Opening Of Its Own Accord

Tony McKibbin

Miguel Gomes' Tabu is a film, like Godard's Eloge de l'amour (2002), that might seem as if it has been made the wrong way round, with the past taking place after the future, so that we would need to look again at the film to wonder how certain lines, actions and unusual behaviours contain within them elements of a past story that has yet to be revealed. Gomes' film is initially set in present day Lisbon, and then moves back in time after one of the film's leading characters, Aurora (Laura Soveral), passes away. Her neighbour Pilar (Teresa Madruga) tracks down a figure of some importance in the late woman's life and, after the funeral, he explains to her how significant they were to each other.

Miguel Gomes
Tabu is also very much a film in two halves in the sense that the first section is observational; the second narrational. If in the first half it is as if people contain huge areas of silence within them, the second section shows why this might be so with the release of some of these feelings. The important man in Aurora's life was Gian Luca Ventura, her great love, a man she met not long after meeting her husband, and with whom she had an affair while she was pregnant with her husband's child. But the film is permeated by a sadness much greater than a lost love, and its achievement lies in making the story seem wholly important but at the same time not at all significant. How to explain this paradox? Perhaps by saying something about time, about the manner in which the film's first half contains time within the bodies of the characters, and the second half releases it into the nature of an event, an event that is both personal (between Aurora and Gian-Luca) and more broadly political, as the film touches upon but refuses to explore the uprisings in the Portuguese African colony where the second section takes place. This isn't at all because Gomes refuses the political dimension; more it would seem that he didn't want to make a film about politics where the issues would be more important than the individual.
Tabu's interest in the individual though doesn't lie at all in the individualistic, and this is why the problem of time is so important to the film: time passes through the individual and erodes the singularity of self. When we see Gian Luca Ventura as an old man (Henrique Espírito Santo), we see an impressive face, but not a face we would immediately recognize when we see the dashing, younger Gian Luca (Carlotto Cotta) later in the film as the older self narrates his story and the film plunges into time past. When Eric Kohn in IndieWire says "'flashback' doesn't quite describe the abrupt shift to storybook romanticism that defines the rest of the running time", he touches upon the film's problem with the temporal, but a comment from Proust's Time Regained helps us understand something of the film's ambition and success: "But it is sometimes just at the moment when we think that everything is lost that the intimation arrives which may save us; one had knocked on all the doors which lead nowhere, and then one stumbles without knowing it on the only door through which one can enter - which one might have sought in vain for a hundred years - and it opens of its own accord."
In the film's first section it's as if the film is knocking on three doors - Aurora's; her neighbour, Pilar, who would seem to be the film's central character; and Aurora's maid, Santa (Isabel Munoz Cardoso) - but halfway through the film and with the introduction of Gian Luca, it is this door that opens of its own accord and that the film disappears into, becoming, as a consequence, a very different film without at all arriving at the arbitrary. Like Eloge de'Lamour, Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004), Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006) and Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1995), Tabu searches out a register of feeling that is stronger than the coherence of its form, and finds it in the affair between Aurora and Gian Luca, in a body language of passion completely at odds with the bodies of those in the film's first section. If Aurora and Santa, Pilar and also her friend, a painter, all share a sense of despondency in their bodies, the young Aurora (Ana Moreira) and Gian Luca possess instead anticipation. Now if Gomes had given to these youthful bodies their full extension the film might have lost contact completely with its first half, but instead by changing what would seem to be the form, Gomes remains consistent to his theme: he manages to retain the film's air of disappointment by making sure the love affair is very much a chronicle of love and death foretold.
How does Gomes do this? First of all by refusing to allow the past to become anything more than a fragment of memory as the story is narrated by the aged Gian Luca, with the occasional interruption from the Aurora of the past as she responds to the letters he sends. Gomes also relies on partiality of sound: though we hear nobody in the past speak as the voices are muted, we do hear the band playing and its singer singing. There are various ambient sounds we hear also. It's as if the past is trapped between oblivion and recollection, a mode which literature can easily offer but is much harder to do in film, and this is where the film resembles the cinema of the great Marguerite Duras but actually feels closer to her fictional work. In a film like India Song (1975), Duras worked with the disjunction between voice and image, as the film told the story as narration, while the actors were caught in the image rather like people in a game of musical statues. They could move but they remained at the same time inert, as if aware of the melancholy in which they were caught, and their body language and their silence reflected this.

In Tabu, the two leading characters are not aware of their future past, of what the body will seem like reflected upon by a self in the future looking back, but instead oblivious even to their present. Here they are in colonial Africa, with Aurora married and with her husband's child in her womb, and Gian Luca says that he lived this intense present with no thought for the future at all. Where Duras seemed to want a melancholic feeling that would trap the characters in a past that they couldn't escape because of the weight of the future reflections that will contain them, Gomes, through Gian Luca's voice over, returns us to the past with the emphasis more on nostalgia than on melancholia. The difference between the two is the difference between a past that has been irretrievably lost but that remains halcyon, and a past that is contained by the regret that things could have been otherwise. One wouldn't want to say Gomes's vision is simply nostalgic, but its register is different from Duras's, and the aesthetic choice to incorporate a wider variety of sounds, to give the characters agency in their actions even if we do not hear their voices, reflects this.
Duras's fiction is equally melancholic, and yet her fiction breathes more easily than her films because where in the likes of India Song Duras finds a form for melancholia that indicates sensory motor-collapse, a mode in which one's agency is so limited, so incapable of action, that it mutes many of the audio elements and the body's movements, this is a given of literature and not a subtractive force. One of the problems with film is the opposite from that in literature. Where the writer starts with the blank page that she must then fill; the filmmaker works with a full frame that he must accept contains more than he might immediately wish to be present. A scene in a novel can describe one character's appearance but leave the other character not at all visually sketched. It can describe the sitting room the characters are in, but choose not to describe the kitchen they walk into. To offer the equivalent detail/vagueness in film form is to produce the radical in one medium that would be conventionally accepted in the other. Duras was obviously an experimental novelist as she was seen to be part of the nouveau roman of the fifties, but her perspective on time and space seemed less radical than those in some of Alain Robbe-Grillet's, Claude Simon's or Nathalie Sarraute's work. The partial angle Duras offered as she explored the problem of time still fitted into the conventions of novelistic expectation. Her directorial work (as opposed to her script for Resnais' Hiroshima, mon amour, which is another matter) did not, and this could lead one to say she is a great writer and only an interesting director, or a fine writer but a more radical filmmaker.
Tabu is in this sense a more conventional film than Duras's work, but achieves something of her novels' affect. What it leaves out does not feel radical; it seems to push the problem of time without pushing beyond the acceptable limits of the form. What the film leaves out doesn't arrive at the formally exhausting, but instead the emotionally precise. One doesn't need to hear what the characters say, since the voice-over conveys the feelings, and the body language of the characters augment them. When Gian Luca's narration insists that he had broken people's hearts and lived a carefree life, when he tells us that though he had lived near Aurora for months but had never met her, we know that their meeting will be monumental. And when they do meet, we see in their body language- as Aurora refuses to meet Gian Luca's eyes unless talking directly to him, as Gian Luca steals the occasional gratuitous glance at her- that this is coup de foudre. The voices might be muted, but the situation isn't ambiguous. In India Song, by contrast, the body language remains indeterminate and the sounds do little to add to narrative information.
As Gilles Deleuze (in Cinema 2: The Time Image) and others would note: Duras is a filmmaker interested in the separation of sound and image, in acknowledging the breach that exists between the two, evident in the different technology utilised, and that for the first thirty years of cinema filmmakers worked in silence. Some filmmakers worked with separating sound and image (like Godard and Duras), others insisted on absolute fidelity to source sound (Straub and Huillet), others accepted the image as pure and the sound as an addition (the dubbing used in much Italian cinema, including the films of Fellini and Pasolini, whom the Straubs railed against for using post-synching in a brief piece collected in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen's Film Theory and Criticism). Others are like Rohmer who, despite the occasional experiment (Perceval [1978]), usually incorporated the importance of the word through voice-over or lengthy conversational disquisitions: unrealistic perhaps, but not challengingly troublesome. This would lead, for example, to Robbe-Grillet dismissively commenting on Rohmer's 'lazy' use of talking heads in an interview in Paris Review.

It is as if recent films like The Artist (Michael Hazanavicius, 2011), A Useful Life (Federico Veiroj, 2010) and Tabu are interested in returning to elements of the silent cinema and the question might be 'to what end'? If The Artist is such a wonderfully gentle waste of time, it is because it is not at all interested in creating a problem greater than its element of homage. Tabu wants to return not so much to the silents as to utilise a mode halfway between silent film and audio cinema. While the first half of the film shares similarities with A Useful Life as it captures well the quiet, tentative sadness of an existence possibly half-lived, the second half allows the film to move from the silence of the body containing its secrets, to a mind revelling in its capacity for recall. We should remember that Gian Luca has been sworn to a lifetime of secrecy, and it is only on Aurora's death that he can now at last talk. As he starts to speak, so the heavy bodies of the first half become the energetic bodies in the second.
All the main characters get to move quickly and passionately (Gian Luca, Aurora, her husband, Gian Luca's best friend Mario) through space. Whether it is Gian Luca moving through the African locale on a car or motorbike, or Aurora crossing from her own place to Gian Lucas's for their first assignation, life has no excess gravity, but only the grace of bodily movement. Where the first half Tabu sometimes suggests movement within stillness, evident when Pilar and Aurora sit in what looks like a shopping mall and the background constantly moves behind them as they talk, in the second half the camera seems more documentative, no matter its careful delineating of screen space. When, for example, his fellow band members throw Gian Luca into the pool, Gomes's camera allows for them to grab him on screen, disappear from the frame as the camera remains fixed, and then shows him tossed into the pool without the camera ‘flinching'. There is more than enough movement in the bodies for the camera often to settle for the transfixed.
The film's very title invokes silent cinema, or rather the birth of sound as it references Murnau's classic of the South Seas. Murnau's film was a prelapsarian account of life on a small island; Gomes' is a colonial take on the ‘dark continent'. Where the tabu in Murnau's film was consistent with a Malinowskian look at what constitutes a taboo in primitive cultures, Gomes' film is very much interested in what constitutes a taboo in a colonial one. There have of course been numerous films about taboo-breaking in the pickled heat of colonial Africa, from White Mischief (Michael Radford, 1987) to Chocolate (Claire Denis, 1988), from White Material (Claire Denis, 2009) to Out Of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985) - some great and some much less so. This is partly why we proposed that Tabu's story wasn't significant, and one might even call it stale. Told in the present tense it, would have lent itself towards a melodramatic story that it doesn't entirely avoid (some will have problems with Aurora shooting Mario), but, told from the position of hindsight, it feels instead as though it has the inevitability of the tragic. However this is tragedy not in the Greek sense of a present foretold by the gods, but the past tense of a tragedy that might never have been told at all.
Earlier, in the film's first section, the dying Aurora deliriously talks a little about the experience that Gian Luca will then reveal in detail in the second half, and it is possible this is a story that drove her half mad by living through it and that the rest of her wits were lost in refusing to disclose it. There are practical reasons why she wouldn't do so - Gian Luca killed his best friend though the rebels take responsibility for this, as the film ironically suggests that the personal becomes the political: that Mario's death set in motion the civil war. Nevertheless it was Gian Luca who was responsible. Also, while her husband understands that she has been having an affair, it is an event that Aurora would no doubt have wanted to shield the daughter she speaks so fondly of in the first half from. Aurora initially seems a batty old woman with paranoiac tendencies and a racist streak. She doesn't become any more sympathetic on the basis of later revelations, but she is at least comprehensible. Would others have treated her differently if they had known more about her past, we might wonder?
Yet maybe one of the things the film is interested in is compassion without information, fellow feeling without knowledge. At one moment Pilar goes in search of Gian Luca after Aurora requests his visit as she lies dying. She visits the address she is given and a man answers the door. After momentary wariness he accepts Pilar into his garage and announces that she is a good woman, his dog can sense such things. Earlier in the film, someone else reckons she is a caring woman too, after Pilar insists on giving a gift to someone through a friend. If Pilar is the film's compassionate centre, nevertheless it is Aurora who is its emotional core, the figure for whom passion burns brightly, where for Pilar evidence indicates it doesn't burn at all: feeling permeates, manifesting itself in care for others and a love of God. As she prays before going to bed, she is a woman who finds meaning in the Lord but finds purpose in helping others. There is nothing in the film to indicate Aurora is such a person, and it makes sense on a passionate level that Aurora would go half-crazy, a self-absorbed figure capable of a psychic auto de fe. When she talks about her wonderful daughter we of course see no evidence of this wondrousness, since she never appears, but the comments from her maid indicate that this is just one of many areas in which Aurora fails to read reality.

What the film asks us to do, through its reversal of temporal coordinates, through its observational first half where we get to study body language, is to muse over characters that are locked into their pasts. What does the body of a sixty or seventy year old tell us, and how might we access this history, this accumulation of time and event? Overall, the history of cinema has been about youthful action over aging reflection, with the exceptions often feeling demographically targeted rather than temporally investigative (On Golden Pond [Mark Rydell, 1981], The Whales of August [Lindsay Anderson, 1987], The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel [John Madden, 2011]). They don't plunge into time; they stay close to the shores of reminiscence. Tabu asks us to muse over the lives of its leading characters by giving us so little of their past in the first half, and so exclusively the past of Aurora in the second. What feelings has Pilar denied we might muse when we see her crying while watching a film in Tabu's prologue? What past history would the maid have to divulge if someone accessed her life? Even Pilar's friend, the painter, contains within him hints at a past to which we are not privy.
It is a common enough expression that everyone has a book in them, but another way of looking at this, when we're watching a film, is to wonder whether the characters we're witnessing look like they have a story within them that could unravel into a film of its own. Tabu could just have easily plunged into the maid's life, enquired into Pilar's or explored Pliar's friend's existence, and we might think this for at least two reasons. Firstly that the film's quiet concern for the lives of others contained in Pilar's empathy, is a feeling the film seems to share. The second is that by following Aurora and Gian Luca's story with the partiality of memory, the film opens up the space for partiality in all its manifestations. It lies in the approach a film has towards storytelling as opposed to the angle.
The angle is the starting point required to create dramatic narrative, and this often demands extraordinary events the characters have endured, whether it is crossing the North Pole, climbing the Eiger or fighting in a war. It's as if one senses in the demand for an angle the impatience of the audience for a story that will not waste their time. In the approach, however, it is less the drama of event than the capacity for generating co-feeling. Perhaps Aurora and Gian Luca's story is the most dramatic that could be told out of the lives we are shown, and yet if the film is so interesting it is not because it has chosen this story, more that it could just as easily have chosen others. Its sensibility is on the side of approaching people's lives instead of looking for an angle on them. It is partly why we proposed the story is wholly important but not at all significant as it tells one story but leaves us wondering about the others we haven't been told about. What is the maid's story, what secrets does Pilar hold, and what about Aurora's daughter, who remains a telling off-screen presence? Often a film's angle doesn't allow for creating these types of spaces, and we might think it absurd to wonder what is going on in the minds and bodies of supporting characters in many a film. Their purpose isn't to have either a mind or a body with a history, only with a function. They are an element in the angle of the story; they are not there for the possibilities they contain within them.
Tabu is a film where surrounding the characters there is always more feeling than function, and so consequently even off-screen characters retain a presence. Not only the daughter, we might think, but also a Polish student who didn't make it to Portugal; why not we'll never know. One of the definitions of a tabu is the space that shouldn't be encroached upon by others, as privacy is respected, and people allowed to keep their own council. Gomes' film respects this space all the more by hinting at these thoughts and feelings, but being under no obligation to reveal them, only to hint at their revelation through most of the characters, and explicitly illustrate it through the characters who for many years has been keeping it all in: Aurora, and the person who finally gets to talk about it- Gian Luca.

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