Simply Perfect

Sadly Over-hyped

Nice effects though.

hyped garbage

Who wants to see a film that's shot in black and white, is slow moving and its second part is like a silent film? If the answer is yes then you will be richly rewarded with Tabu. The Portuguese director Miguel Gomes has made a strange poetic film. A Portuguese film in two parts "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise." The bizarre short prologue transports us to a strange world where an intrepid explorer mourning a lost love gets eaten by a melancholic crocodile in Africa. The crocodile reappears throughout Tabu and accept for concluding that it represents an ancient old soul looking over the proceedings I'm not sure of its significance. The first part is set in modern Lisbon which appears to be full of bland apartment blocks. It explores the relationship between the kind melancholic Pilar (Teresa Madruga) and her gambling addicted; fading neighbor Aurora (Laura Soveral) who has a tendency to exaggerate and get lost in her vivid imagination Aurora is having problems with her housekeeper Santa (Isabel Cardoso). She believes Santa has turned her daughter against her with her black witchcraft. In between rescuing Aurora from the casino, Pilar goes to the cinema, joins the UN protests and shares time with her romantic painter man friend. The health decline of Aurora triggers the death bed request to see Gian Luca Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo). Over coffee Gian shares another story of Aurora back in deepest darkest Africa. We are transported back to another time and the film takes on another feel, romantic and sensual. Gomes referencing Sydney Pollack's epic romance Out of Africa begins the story with the immortal lines, "She had a farm in Africa." This part is without dialogue but features a finely scripted voice-over and the sounds of Africa. This section melodramatic and dreamlike details the doomed love affair between Aurora (Ana Moreira), and the seductive adventurer Gian (Carlota Cotta). Cotta looks and is framed like a silent film star, Moreira more like a star of French cinema of the sixties. In between the all-encompassing romance of the privileged whites the Africans toil away, in the fields, as servants, basically second class citizens. Throughout the film Gomes intentionally positions the whites as the ruling class whilst the blacks struggle to be heard. Yet this is never over emphasized.Gomes has crafted a film that stays with you. Those moments in time…A solitary tear awkwardly swiped away by the elder Gian recalling the loss of great love, the stony faced Santa eating the prawns given to her by the annoyingly kind Pilar, the first meeting of the young lovers almost unable to hide their attraction for each other, the bizarre performance of the boy band at the pool house. The performers are all excellent and Rui Pocas does a great job with the black and white cinematography.

I always loved voice-overs in films. Almost as much as I hated all attempts of realism in films.So called "reality" is the worst kind of delusion. It makes us feel that we have time when in truth there is not time. It binds us to the moment and makes us blind to what it means. A story can reveal tragedy but when you are in the midst of it, in the "reality" of it, you only see that "reality" which makes everything trivial.That's the magic of the voice-over. You see everything happening as in "reality" but the voice-over pulls you back and the reveals the greater truth, the story.In this film, this is cleverly utilized. The story is banal for sure but the voice-over reveals that what was conceived as "real" was only a dream. This film stays in the voice-over and shows how most of our talk is just blabber and not necessary to understand what is going on. In the second part of the film, which is the part in which the voice-over takes over, there is no dialogue to be heard and I, as the viewer, could not be more happy about it. The paradise, which is the title of this second half of the film, is, to me, the blessing of not having to hear the blabber. All other sounds are revealed and the director makes a point out of it. These sounds do not disrupt the magic. Only the blabber would do that and bring forth the trivial.

This is a tough film to discuss in 500 words. It's so multifaceted, textural and moody. I'll try my hardest, but from the off, I must suggest that you just experience Tabu for yourself. You may have a different experience or opinion to me, you may feel the exact same. Either way, you won't regret it.Borrowing the name, two-part structure and love affair-plus-colonisation premise from F.W. Murnau's 1931 classic, Miguel Gomes' Tabu is a film of unmistakable vintage. But it's magnificently subversive too. With one foot in the past, one in the future and a head orbiting in it's own artistic universe, it's a little thing of beguiling beauty.Tabu opens with a tragicomic prologue centring around an exasperated explorer trekking through the harsh jungles of Southern Africa. Through Gomes' voice-over narration, we learn that he is distraught over the death of his wife some years ago, and this lost adventure will be his last. No crocodile tears on display, but there is an ominous little croc that lingers through the sequence - and the rest of the film - with cold, mournful eyes. In a word, stunning.From here, we begin with the chapter "A LOST PARADISE". In something that resembles a present day Lisbon, we meet our leading lady Aurora (Laura Soveral). A compulsive gambler whose memories are slipping away from her, yet images of hairy monkeys and African farmers still manage to pervade her dreams. Whilst she tries to recall her youth with altruistic next-door-neighbour Pilar (Teresa Madruga) and Santa (Isabel Cardoso), a black woman whom Aurora often woefully calls a housemaid/tyrannous witch, the fatalism of the prologue suggests that Aurora will only be able to relive her glory days in the afterlife.Cue part 2, "PARADISE". Told through vivid flashbacks and narration from former lover Gian- Luca Venture, we're finally made aware of Aurora's past once lost. Married to a wealthy farmer in the idyllic rural setting of Mozambique, Aurora embarks on a fiery affair with the devilishly handsome nomad Ventura, after her eager pet crocodile crossed the forbidden line into his neighbouring garden. It's a time of lost innocence and furtive whispers, so Gomes decides to strip away all forms of diegetic sound, leaving just the bodies and faces of incredible actors Ana Moreira and Carloto Cotta to express this simple, enduring love.Like Leos Carax's comeback success Holy Motors, Tabu is a film entrenched in film history and scholarly technique (unsurprising considering that they both started out as film critics). But Gomes goes one step further. Filmed in intoxicating black & white by cinematographer Rui Poças, Tabu is beautifully photographed; from the alarmingly stark opening image of a sweaty explorer looking lost in an African jungle, to the final image of a baby crocodile turning away from the camera and crawling out of frame. In an inspired touch, the two halves are filmed in different film stocks – the first in familiar 35mm, and the second in exquisitely old-fashioned 16mm. They mingle together to create a film with a perennial quality, existing as a piece of cinematic artifice but with a modern, reflexive twist.Similarly, the sound construction is unnervingly good. Mixing the deadened silence with ambient sounds, poetic narration and a Portuguese rendition of "Be My Little Baby" (made famous by The Ronettes) the composite sonisphere speaks for the unspoken, tabooed love to exceptionally powerful effect.Because the film's aesthetic is so dazzling, it's easy to lose track of the whimsical storyline. Based on diary entries and private letters, it has a very nostalgic feel, similar to Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. Just like that film, Tabu isn't a perfect movie, there's pacing issues and Gomes seems to be wrestling with three separate endings. But there's enough moments of unforgettable virtuosity, grace and intellect to make Tabu unmissable.More reviews at www.366movies.com

The title Tabu is one that looms large over film history recalling the collaboration of two pillars of silent cinema, F.W. Murnau and Robert J. Flaherty, about a forbidden love story (the film's taboo) between a fisherman and a holy maid, and splits its story between two clear sections titled "Paradise" and "Paradise Lost". In Gomes' film, we begin with a prologue of a Portuguese man's expedition to Mozambique in search of his lover's soul, ending in him being devoured by alligators and being reborn as one, before moving to the first section of the film, titled "Paradise Lost". In it, we follow María, a woman activist who's neighbour with a senile lady with a gambling addiction by the name of Aurora, and her African maid Santa. Aurora is poor and raving madly about her fictitious exploits in Africa and her strange dreams of being raped by apes, all the while being suspicious of Santa, accusing her of voodoo witchcraft. Eventually the woman's health declines rapidly, and as a last wish she asks María to look for a man called Ventura. María eventually finds Ventura but is unable to bring him to Aurora before her death. After the funeral, Ventura joins with María and Santa and begins telling the story of his affair with Aurora (played by the beautiful Ana Moreira), where he confirms she did actually live in Mozambique, and where he tells of his forbidden romance with her while she was pregnant of her husband's baby. Here we begin the section titled "Paradise", detailing the story of their affair and of their Portuguese social circle, back when Mozabique was still a colony, which makes up the larger bulk of the film.One of the aspects that surprises outright is just how brilliantly Gomes manages to capture this story from an aesthetic point of view. Visually the film is of course emulating an older style of filmmaking, right down to the choice of working in an academic ratio (1.37:1), but his visual style is perhaps less reminiscent of Murnau's, and rather seems to emulate 50s Kenji Mizoguchi and early Satyajit Ray. There is that same remarkably organic, unimposing and ever so elegant kind of black and white photography which is harder and harder to find today (even the first half which is filmed in contemporary Lisbon), all the while the film works with a very limited array of sounds and music providing a background for a story told otherwise entirely through the voice-over of Ventura.The voice-over eventually leads to many labyrinthine stories regarding the lives of many people he met in Mozambique, not least the members of his own rock n' roll band, specifically Mario to whom Ventura was a sort of right hand man. The stories are all vivid and told with great detail and humour, but essentially they are a smokescreen to what's otherwise a very simple tragedy of forbidden love, beautifully told. In many ways, even through these many decade-spanning branches, the film's narrative closely resembles the works of Gabriel García Márquez. The love story at the heart of it is one forbidden due in large part to the social aspect, that Aurora is a pregnant, married woman, but all throughout the film there's another side suggesting the nature of this affair's forbiddance is also of a divine kind - it is, precisely, taboo. There are many elements of magical realism at play, from the cryptic opening tale to the encounters with witch-doctors and seers, the latter foreboding the tragic end to the affair. Even the location, set around a fictional Mount Tabu, and the attitude adopted by Dandy, Aurora's pet alligator, seem to plot to make their fates meet. There is a strong mystical power at play, one that, like many of Márquez's most classic works, seems to exist as an unholy hybrid between local and European beliefs product of colonization.Evidently, this affair is doomed from the start. The inversion of the original Tabu titles, leading to an almost sardonic remark over the latter section, allows us to see and know these characters' fate before we see their relationship progress, and thus the development of their relationship is all the more arduous and cathartic.In the Q&A with Miguel Gomes, he mentioned that he had no ulterior motives to tell this story, no overlapping ideas as he does not consider himself to be a smart man and therefore does not consider his ideas "worthy" enough to sustain a film (perhaps in admitting that he's smarter than a vast majority of the filmmakers in the BAFICI), but instead he concentrates on catching glimpses, moments and developing a story out of them. Effectively this is not a film of big ideas and enlightenment, roughly the overarching themes could be related to adultery and natural law with hints of a cultural clash and the likes, but it's never really about that. It's about creating a story that's affecting like no other, and that he's managed to create. With this, Gomes becomes a cinematic force to be reckoned with, and one I'll be following very closely from now on.