Tabu

How do movies inspire our mem­o­ries? It’s a ques­tion nes­tled at the (gigan­tic) heart of Miguel Gomes’ melan­cholic mono­chrome mas­ter­piece, Tabu, a film which gives life to a rhap­sod­ic pageant of death, desire, dashed romance, cloud spot­ting, Spec­tor-inflect­ed soul pop and tal­is­man­ic pet love crocodiles.

With a cav­a­lier approach to sci­ence that only a whim­si­cal­ly inclined film­mak­er could get away with, his film posits that, at a cer­tain point in life, our minds begin to roman­ti­cise and sub­vert the past, fus­ing our hum­drum per­son­al his­to­ries with the con­sol­ing escapist fan­tasies of the sil­ver screen. Tabu is about life remem­bered as silent cinema.

Glanc­ing back, Gomes’ diverse cat­a­logue of films makes him a tough direc­tor to pin down, espe­cial­ly as his style, ref­er­ence points, choice of film stock and sto­ry­telling mode appear to alter from title to title. Yet his eager­ness to pilot his sto­ries through var­i­ous stra­ta of per­cep­tion – real­i­ty, dreams, mem­o­ries and fan­ta­sy – is per­haps the thread that lends his sin­gu­lar oeu­vre its cohesion.

In that light, his tire­some­ly eccen­tric debut fea­ture, The Face You Deserve, is more inter­est­ing when viewed in hind­sight, a Riv­et­t­ian rever­ie about a school teacher who con­tracts the measles and expe­ri­ences a Sev­en Dwarves-style fever dream on his thir­ti­eth birthday.

His stun­ning 2008 fol­low-up, Our Beloved Month of August, con­tained inter­tex­tu­al audac­i­ty to rival the famous era-span­ning edit in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Near the half-way mark, Gomes’ film insou­ciant­ly drifts from being a doc­u­men­tary about rur­al Por­tuguese folk music to a fic­tion film about Por­tuguese folk musicians.

Tabu broad­ly car­ries over this inno­va­tion in that it’s a film of two dis­tinc­tive chap­ters, the first enti­tled ​‘Par­adise’ and the sec­ond ​‘Par­adise Lost’. Yet instead of segue­ing from non-fic­tion to fic­tion, Tabu switch­es from real­ism to fan­ta­sia, from wak­ing life to dream, from the banal to the exot­ic, the mod­ern to the archa­ic, from 35mm to 16mm, from life to cinema.

Ini­tial­ly, we’re allowed to catch up with the har­ried home life of the do-good­ing Pilar (Tere­sa Madru­ga) as her des­per­ate attempts at self-purifi­ca­tion are con­stant­ly stymied by the intru­sions of her bat­ty elder­ly neigh­bour, the fall­en grande dame Miss Auro­ra (Lau­ra Sover­al). Her non­sen­si­cal blath­er­ings are ignored by both Pilar and her long-suf­fer­ing Cape Verdean house­maid, San­ta (Isabel Muñoz Cardoso).

On her deathbed, Auro­ra reveals the name and address of a mys­te­ri­ous local man, Ven­tu­ra, and as Pilar and San­ta sit in the atri­um of a trop­i­cal-themed shop­ping cen­tre, he regales them with a fan­ci­ful tale of heart­break and loss that occurred 50 years pre­vi­ous­ly on the pic­turesque savan­nahs of a fic­tion­al African state and in the vast shad­ow of Mount Tabu.

Though its sweep­ing sec­ond half recalls such clas­si­cal touch­stones as John Ford’s Mogam­bo, Frank Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms or even Max Ophüls’ Let­ter to an Unknown Woman, Gomes’ dis­cernible cinephile ten­den­cies (he used to be a crit­ic) are nev­er elit­ist or super­cil­ious. His skill as a film­mak­er is in mak­ing the quote marks invisible.

He enters the worlds of these films rather than ref­er­enc­ing them point blank. His film also shares its title (and much roman­tic bag­gage) with FW Murnau’s 1931 swan­song, Tabu: A Sto­ry of the South­ern Seas, and along­side its brac­ing­ly sin­cere depic­tion of doomed young love, it shares Murnau’s sub­tle back­drop of a soci­ety suf­fer­ing exploita­tion from the West.

As a writer, Gomes dis­plays a very appeal­ing inter­est in folk­lore and social his­to­ry, espe­cial­ly when it comes to forg­ing his own apoc­ryphal tall tales. The world of Tabu accounts for the unre­li­a­bil­i­ty of mem­o­ry, and though this his­to­ry does address some of the real­i­ties of Por­tuguese colo­nial­ism, it’s flecked with ironies, anachro­nisms and tem­po­ral sleights of hand. The nar­ra­tion of the sec­ond half (which he also intones) is a mod­el of lit­er­ate, epis­to­lary adven­ture sto­ry­telling, and it’s an aspect that dove­tails nice­ly with scenes ear­li­er in the film in which San­ta sits up at night leaf­ing through a copy of Defoe’s ​‘Robin­son Crusoe’.

Despite its iron­ic employ­ment of Brecht­ian cul­tur­al sig­ni­fiers, Tabu real­ly does chan­nel the intox­i­cat­ing, unmis­tak­able mood of clas­si­cal Hol­ly­wood of the 1940s. The gauzy effect of the 16mm stock and the use of 4:3 Acad­e­my ratio may tech­ni­cal­ly trans­port you back to the gold­en age, but it’s Rui Poças’ gor­geous high-con­trast cin­e­matog­ra­phy that lands the aes­thet­ic suck­er punch.

One scene sees Ven­tu­ra loi­ter­ing in a dark room, star­ing out at the sun-bleached plains. The inter­play between light and shad­ow is, in itself, utter­ly exquis­ite. It makes you think that Gomes has man­aged to res­ur­rect the spir­it of Gregg Toland and sup­plant it into Poças’ body.

On the sound­track, Gomes seam­less­ly works in out-of-time pop songs via an amus­ing sub­plot involv­ing a tuxe­do-clad lounge com­bo named Mario’s Band. A scene where they line up along the side of a swim­ming pool and mime along to the Ramones’ Wall of Sound cov­er of ​‘Baby, I Love You’ offers a sub­lime artic­u­la­tion of Gomes’ authen­tic love of sen­ti­men­tal pop music, already seen in Our Beloved Month of August.

A lat­er roman­tic clinch is tipped over into ecsta­t­ic sad­ness by mas­ter­ful appli­ca­tion of a Por­tuguese ver­sion of The Ronettes’ ​‘Be My Baby’. You can almost envi­sion Gomes sit­ting in the edit room in front of a glis­ten­ing Steen­beck, momen­tar­i­ly ash­tray­ing his fat sto­gie and exclaim­ing to his col­leagues, ​“Time to push it over the top, boys.”