Tabu: Review

September 16, 2012.

A whimsical, poignant tale of forbidden love, loss and melancholic crocodiles, Miguel Gomes’s Tabu grips, bites and wounds, finds Roberto Oliveri.

Tabu is divided in two. The first part: ‘Lost Paradise,’ is set in contemporary Lisbon, and the second, called ‘Paradise,’ takes place in 1950s colonial Africa. The former tells the story of Pilar (Teresa Madruga) who lives on her own but is never lonely; she has an admirer, an artist who attempts to woo her by giving her some of his woeful attempts at modern art. She is also a good friend to her temperamental neighbour, Aurora (Laura Soveral), an elderly woman constantly at odds with her Cape Verdean maid Santa – whose silent suffering Isabel Cardoso perfectly captures.

Aurora connects the film’s two parts: she is both the object (in the first) and the subject (in the second). That we are introduced to Aurora in a casino encapsulates her personality: she’s willing to take risks. In this case, the gamble hasn’t paid off, and she’s blown away all her money. Pilar rescues her, at Santa’s behest – demonstrating their burdensome friendship. Pilar is a pillar of support. When Aurora falls ill and is taken to hospital, it is up to Pilar to find an old acquaintance, Gian Luca Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo). She finds him, but Aurora dies before she can see him. Ventura’s visage of deep grief suggests a strong connection that at once interests us. Who is Ventura? What happened between him and the elderly gambler?

The first part ushers in the second, a film in its own right with a voiceover provided by Ventura. A young Aurora (Ana Moreira) moves out to Africa with her father, marries and settles down. A young Ventura (Carloto Cotta) is also in Africa touring with his band. One day, Aurora’s husband meets Ventura and they strike up a friendship so deep that the former asks the latter to live with him. Ventura and a pregnant Aurora fall in love and start a doomed affair.

For an hour there is no dialogue at all. With its exaggerated facial expressions, coupled with camera shots calculated to suggest interior character states, the film borrows the techniques of silent films captured by The Artist. These techniques, merging narration and image, make dialogue seem superfluous. Gomes uses different film stock to further separate the two parts. For the first he used 35mm, which firmly places us in the present, and for the second he used 16mm, which captures the mysticism of Africa. The graininess of 16mm film lends the continent a sense of the ethereal.

The second part is woven through with tender moments. For instance, the star-crossed lovers escape to a field to avoid prying eyes and lie down together under the cloudy heavens. They playfully use their imaginations to impose animal shapes onto the clouds (Gomes marks the celluloid to give us these shapes). There’s a sense in which consolation is found in the imagination; it transports them into a different, less antagonistic, more ideal realm. Such frivolousness, though, merely serves to emphasise the wretchedness of their situation.

Images, and the ways in which we use our imaginations to construct them, are at the centre of the film. Miguel Gomes offers images and forces us to connect them. For example Aurora is armed with a gun, and the next shot is of a dead buffalo. Yet, this mental complicity with the audience is at times undermined. The voiceover of the second part at times insults the audience’s intelligence by telling them what they already know from the images on the screen.

When we are told that Aurora’s cook had guessed that she is pregnant and spread the rumour, there’s a beautiful long shot of him, framed by her house window (as though being watched from a position of domestic safety) walking into the wilderness, into uncertainty. We are simultaneously shown him carrying his belongings (so we can guess that he’s been told to leave his job) and told about his fate. Similarly, when Ventura tells his band mate and best friend Mario about the affair, we are shown Mario’s vexed expression and told that Mario is less than happy about the situation. This lessens the impact of image, which is unfortunate given that Tabu with its allusions to silent films is a celebration of image.

The second part of Tabu redeems a slightly bloated first part. At its centre is a powerful tale of forbidden love which, accompanied with its harrowingly poignant music, hits us hard. There’s much to think about; it’s a philosophically potent film. Much could be read into characters as animals. In a brief, enigmatic – perhaps gratuitous – prologue, an explorer dives into the mouth of a crocodile to escape the grief of his wife’s death. Pilar is a political animal (she attends protests – chants of ‘shame onu’ generate laughter). Moreover, one cannot ignore the role of Africa as a character, themes of colonialism, of racial tension – Santa reads Robinson Crusoe, a symbol of colonialism and imperialism.

Tabu’s gorgeous monochrome cinematography captures its colourful and experimental narrative. For all its experimentation, it is at bottom a tragic romance – what is so tragic is the fact that paradise is never regained.