TABU

Miguel Gomes’s award-winning TABU features stories within stories and a curious crocodile

TABU (Miguel Gomes, 2012)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
December 26 – January 8
212-727-8110
www.adoptfilms.net
www.filmforum.org

Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, inspired by F. W. Murnau’s 1931 two-part Tabu and stories related to him by family members in addition to a band featured in his second film, charms and confuses in his third film, the highly unusual and intriguing Tabu. Shot in alluring black-and-white by Rui Poças, the film begins with a captivating, intensely sad tale of lost love narrated by Gomes that takes place prior to the Portuguese Colonial War. That section is followed by the introduction of Pilar (Teresa Madruga), a relatively ordinary, very kind middle-aged woman in modern-day Lisbon who watches out for her elderly neighbor, Aurora (Laura Soveral), a gambling addict who lives with her black maid, Santa (Isabel Cardoso), whom she accuses of performing voodoo on her. As Aurora’s mental and physical health worsens, she sends Pilar and Santa to find a man named Gian Luca Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), whose recalling of his youthful adventures as a wild, carefree musician (Carloto Cotta) with the beautiful young Aurora (Ana Moreira) takes up the rest of the film. The long flashback, which again returns to a time before the colonial war, is told completely in voice-over, like a silent film with subtitles, the only sound coming from the 1960s music made by the group led by Gian Luca’s best friend, Mário (Manuel Mesquita), and Aurora’s husband (Ivo Müller). (Yes, that song by the pool is actually the Ramones.) Dividing the film into two parts, “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise,” Gomes (The Face You Deserve, Our Beloved Month of August) and cowriter Mariana Ricardo investigate forbidden romance, colonialism, racism, class structure, and haunting memories in stories within stories that give Tabu an atmosphere of mystery and impending doom. Linking it all together is an African crocodile with thoughts of escape. Winner of the FIPRESCI Jury Prize and Alfred Baeur Prize for Artistic Innovation at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, Tabu is an aural and visual wonder, a uniquely structured film deserving of multiple viewings in order to grasp its full impact, although do not expect all questions to be answered in clear-cut ways.