Tabu

Aurora is constantly whining to her neighbour, treating her maid unfairly, and bemoaning her daughter’s unwillingness to visit her. Before dying, Aurora makes a mysterious wish: to see a man named Gian Luca Ventura one more time. The latter shares a secret pact with her, and has his own story to tell: a wonderful sentimental tragedy that took place fifty years ago, right before the beginning of the Portuguese Colonial War. The story begins as follows: “Aurora had a farm in Africa at the foot of Mount Tabu…”

“The project of the film is to show colonialism assimilated to a failed Hollywood.” –Miguel Gomes

“Tabu” begins with a black and white prologue, a film within the film, where an explorer is gobbled up by a crocodile who, in turn, becomes melancholic. This bit is followed by the story of Pilar, an aging crow who, in modern day Lisbon, lives alone in a melancholy of her own. In between her activities as a devoted Catholic, the courtship of a somewhat annoying painter and the treason of a Polish woman on her way to a Taizé meeting, we discover her elderly neighbour, Aurora. When she’s not splurging her cash in casinos, Aurora is slowly losing her mind and suspects her African servant, Santa, of casting a voodoo spell on her. On her deathbed, Aurora demands the presence of a man whose existence was unknown to everyone. Pilar and Santa quickly discover that this man indeed exists, but his mind is no longer whole…

After this “Lost Paradise”, the spectator is ushered into “Paradise”, the second part of the film which is shown to be a flashback. We hear Aurora’s lover’s voice recount their sorrowful story, in an Africa seen through a sort of asynchronous cinema where the images are consistent with the time but the sound is contemporary. We find ourselves immersed in realism and wonder, the grotesque and the tragic, trapped in a universe filled with colonial reminiscences, circumstantial music and sincere romances that is nevertheless ruled by poetry, humour from the past and the present, and a feeling of freedom transmitted only by masterpieces once they find the right tone. Even if “Tabu” is right on track, it is only through fiddling with the very notion of trails and paths – whether they be beaten or pristine, whether we follow them or not, but which are always filled with meaning. Freedom stems greatly from interference with these paths, from feeling that the course can be changed wherever, whenever.

For Miguel Gomes, “Tabu” is “a film of ghosts”. The defeated power of Portugal hovers palpably over it, just like the bruised love of its protagonists and the disappearance of silent film. “Paradise Lost” indeed. We’re confronted with material cinema, where the characters disappear alongside the material which films them. References to Murnau abound in “Tabu”: the title of the film as well as the titles of the parts that compose it (which are inversed), the name Aurora, and the imaginary world which consolidates the convergence of image and sound. Cinematic Africa faintly echoes Hollywood’s golden days, and we can sensibly access the sublime of Van Dyke’s Tarzan… In the African part of the film, the actors themselves appear plucked from another era: the sensual beauty of the young Aurora and the moustached charm of a modern Errol Flynn are not uninvolved with the fascination exerted by “Paradise”.

The recurring figure of the crocodile, a mere symbol in many instances but often a character in itself, is one of the most sensual and melancholic threads in the film. A clearly poetic element, a marvellous word pronounced with difficulty by children which is nevertheless disarming when pronounced in Portuguese.

On January 10th, the first showing of “Tabu” will be introduced by Miguel Gomes and followed by an encounter with the director as well as Mariana Ricardo, Bruno Duarte et Nuno Pessoa.

“Tabu" is not a film filled with cinephile references, nor is it a pastiche or a tribute; it’s a movie that goes back to the origins of cinema, the emotions and surprises that an image projected onto a white screen could arouse in the first spectators (…) Past and present, Portugal and Africa, slapstick and drama, life and death, men and animals, servants and masters, silences and songs…these are the ingredients to a poem of image and sound which dejectedly resuscitates an extinguished world, a golden age, a lost paradise which makes one laugh and cry with its twists and turns but also because one gets the feeling of witnessing a lost miracle in a time that isn’t worthy of it. It is rare to find films which seem to reinvent cinema, which offer an unforgettable experience where everything is charming. Tabu is one of those films. – Olivier Père, journalist and film programmer.

 The film will be presented until February the 24th (see calendar for time and date of screenings).

The film, a true ode to cinema, shot in black and white 35mm and 16mm (which give each part its own tonality) will be released in 35mm in Nova, the only theatre in Belgium where it won’t be a video projection. In an age where digital has taken over film at a dizzying rate and where film is an increasingly difficult and expensive medium, you can still experience this movie in its original format. The other films included in the Miguel Gomes retrospective will also be shown in 35mm.