Review: Tabu (2012)
Cast: Teresa Madruga, Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira
Director: Miguel Gomes
Country: Portugal | Germany | Brazil | France
Genre: Drama
Editor’s Notes: The following review of Tabu is a part of Guido’s coverage of the 14th International Buenos Aires Film Festival (BAFICI), which runs from Thursday, 11th April through to Sunday, 22nd April.
A cinephile film, not cheeky and ironic, but innocent and childlike. What movie references are in Tabu almost don’t exist as such, interwoven as they are into the romantic texture of the visual symphony. I am reminded of another Portuguese film, Pedro Costa’s breakout bombshell O Sangue, with its interminable list of cinematic quotes and paraphrases - compiled by Adrian Martin in a memorable review - all melted into a delirious whole. So dynamic is the weaving of references, that the borders between them disappear, dissolved into a unified brew. Something similar happens in the playful Uruguayan gem A Useful Life, about a film archivist who finds himself out of a job when the cinematheque he works in has to close for financial reasons. Unable to share films with others through the projection of celluloid, the archivist takes to the streets of Montevideo, where he communicates his love of cinema through his body, dancing and walking around like a 21st Century Monsieur Hulot. In all these films, Tabu included, the references are mashed together into a poetic language of inflection and cadence, the words nonsense vehicles for an evocative sound.
A cinephile film, not cheeky and ironic, but innocent and childlike. What movie references are in Tabu almost don’t exist as such, interwoven as they are into the romantic texture of the visual symphony.
In keeping with this family resemblance, Tabu begins with a film-within-a-film: a self-consciously cheesy entertainment about colonial Africa, which ignores the plight of the colonized to focus instead on the inner turmoil of a tortured Portuguese explorer. We quickly segue into Pilar, the fifty-something woman watching the film-within-a-film at a Lisbon movie theater. She is absorbed into the melodrama on-screen. Even if it is politically reprobate and aesthetically empty, it transports her elsewhere, to a lush world of nature and emotion, where feelings are externalized as spectacular, dreamy imagery. Back in her real life, Pilar yearns for personal connection. She hopes to lodge a Polish traveler, but the agreement doesn’t pan out. At the airport, the Pole essentially ditches Pilar, preferring to commute with her adolescent friends instead. Rejected and lonely, Pilar finds purpose in helping her elderly neighbor Aurora, who is cared for by an African housekeeper, Santa. Aurora is a relic of a generation gone with the wind, as it were: racist, prejudiced, senile, and still chained to colonialist values, she is convinced that Santa is a voodoo witch and, when she’s not ranting incoherently, she drowns in gambling debt and longs for a distant daughter who hardly speaks to her. Before long, Aurora dies. Her last request, to see her former flame Ventura, is never fulfilled, since he arrives too late. Shedding a tear out a corner of his eye, Ventura sits down with Pilar and Santa to recount his affair with Aurora, conveying all of them to Portuguese colonial Africa, fifty years ago.
The second half of Tabu, then, morphs into a visual representation of Ventura’s tale, or more specifically, into Pilar’s mental reconstruction of what she is hearing. Nourished by the images of colonial Africa that she has seen in numerous films - like the one that opens Tabu - Pilar imagines Ventura’s oral history through the filter of her exotic fantasies. During this second half, the actions plays out much like a silent film, except we hear Ventura’s narration and see Pilar’s interpretation of events. We can envision both of them, old man and middle-aged woman, as competing storytellers. He provides the script, she adds the montage, and, together, they make up the film we see. Meanwhile, the characters who populate the narrative - beautiful young Aurora and restless, drifting young Ventura, amidst the wild of an idealized colonial setting, with sprightly white masters and subservient black workers - have no voice. We hear some ambient sounds, but no speech (unlike the first half of Tabu, which had plenty of audible dialogue). Thus, these mute characters seem to float on-screen, unreal. Since we cannot hear them, they become less tangible, more ethereal, larger than life, ghosts of image and movement.
Understanding the past is, then, a negotiation between mediated versions, interlocking pieces of a puzzle that becomes no more objective as it is completed, only more thorough.
Ventura’s story cannot be penetrated or plundered for truth. A barrier of time keeps us from the past it refers to, and any return to this past is necessarily a reinterpretation. What we hear is already mediated by Ventura’s telling and further appropriated by Pilar’s imagination, so that what we are getting is a crossroads of sources, narrators, and echoes. Understanding the past is, then, a negotiation between mediated versions, interlocking pieces of a puzzle that becomes no more objective as it is completed, only more thorough. History, however, trembles at the margins of the puzzle, complicates the collaborative effort between Ventura and Pilar. As Aurora and her lover suffer their doomed romance, the undefined African colony they call home prepares for revolution. Or rather, the white ruling class, anticipating a future challenge to their status, ruthlessly and murderously defend themselves. This cruelty is relegated to the background of the narrative, until the inescapable rush of History foregrounds it: eventually, the timeless love between Aurora and Ventura is used as justification - by a turn of events too complicated to explain here - for white repression of the black populace.
Tabu itself gives little playtime to its black actors. Even Santa is rather impenetrable, and all other African characters do little other than dance, perform servile tasks, or thread circumspectly across the frame. They all inhabit a story that doesn’t want to contain them, because they remind us of all that is not idyllic about the deceptively peaceful colonial setting. It is telling that old Aurora ends up in the hands of an African. A kind of karmic retribution: her youth was spent ignoring the locals, and now her last days are in the hands of a daughter of the colonized. Still, Tabu is partly complicit in the skewed perception of its white protagonists. Blacks do not feature prominently as major characters, and when they do, they come in the shape of stoic Santa. Tabu, of course, is about the colonizers and how they deal with their own past, and an argument could be made that director Miguel Gomes, as a Portuguese, really has no claim to review History through the eyes of a culture that is not his own. I believe Claire Denis proposed a similar justification for her aesthetic choices in Chocolat (though she finally made a film from a black perspective anyways, and a damn good one, called 35 Rhums). Still, one wonders what profound treasures might have been uncovered if, for example, Aurora had been the storyteller and Santa had been the listener, replacing Ventura and Pilar, respectively. What competing and shifting narratives, then!
Nevertheless, as Gomes has repeated several times throughout the festival circuit, he did not mean to judge colonial attitudes, merely to portray them, and, most importantly, he does not approach his work conceptually through ideas, but intuitively and organically.
Nevertheless, as Gomes has repeated several times throughout the festival circuit, he did not mean to judge colonial attitudes, merely to portray them, and, most importantly, he does not approach his work conceptually through ideas, but intuitively and organically. Gomes, in fact, is a very instinctual filmmaker, working with the tools of a private armoire of symbols and emotions. These are not explained to the audience, but comprise a kind of hidden scaffold, sustaining the expressive imagery. Here’s one such oblique symbol: crocodiles. For Gomes, they are time itself, reptiles that have remained, as a species, practically unchanged for millions of years, and have seen all human triumphs and tragedies, like eternal observers. This is not an explicit theme in Tabu, only a kind of reverberation. We see crocodiles throughout the running time, stare into their impassive eyes, observe their rugged bodies, like weathered rock formations. Gomes draws from his well of personal meanings to provoke ambiguous, unspecific reactions from his viewers.
Tabu is a tremulous surface. Its crossed narrators, bipartite structure, earnest emotion, overdone melodrama, and mingling of film genres, makes for volatile terrain. It wavers constantly from harmony to disorder, from arch excess to honest affection, from superficial trifle to deep statement, and, when it reaches transcendence, does so without solemnity, at the points where all its manifold, underground currents intersect and explode, and a face with waterfall tears is scored to the pop choruses of Phil Spector’s “Be My Baby”. Tabu is not consistently effective. When its threads dangle, the effect is less than persuasive. Gomes is juggling dangerous balls, among them a few that condemn parts of his film to mere cuteness and preciousness. But he is not Guy Maddin. If the Canadian offers a self-conscious, quirky mixture of silent movie aura crossed with feverish editing, hoping to capture the rhythm of his dreams, Gomes is quieter, subtler, on the verge of a wink, on the edge of ironic distance, without ever falling into that precipice, finally embracing his artifice and admitting that, at some level, he is as hopelessly romantic as Aurora and Ventura. Tabu, then, is caught at mid-wink, like an adult repeating a bedtime story to his child for the hundredth time, at first absent-mindedly, and then, as the story wears on, increasingly engrossed, until the climactic finale is all wide-eyed attention from both child and parent. Tabu changes its relationship to itself as it goes. I was moved and apathetic in equal measures, as the film splintered into a thousand shapes and, at frequent intervals, coalesced into a miraculous whole. My disorientation will take some time to becalm.
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