Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012)

Miguel Gomes’ cinephilic tendencies are embedded into the very title of Tabu, taken from F.W. Murnau’s final film and modeled after its bifurcated structure. Black-and-white photography, visibly shot on film instead of digital, only exacerbate the cinematic artifice. Yet the Portuguese director’s aims go well beyond referential touches, and the one on-screen character linked to filmmaking in any way is described in narration as finding movies trivial. Tabu dabbles in trivial matters of its own, but they are played against themselves as Gomes traces the ennui and isolation of the first half back to surprisingly poltiical roots in the second.

A hint lies in an enigmatic prologue that precedes the two stories. A melancholic colonialist stands about idly with sad eyes as African servants labor around him. A Murnau-esque smooth track over hilly terrain speaks to the man’s detached boredom as a narrator (Gomes himself) talks of a lost love that tugs at his heart. The segment ends with the colonialist transformed into an equally sad crocodile, a strange image that will return in the film’s second half.

First, though, Gomes moves to present-day Lisbon, where a Catholic social activist, Pilar (Teresa Madruga), attends to a dementia-stricken woman named Aurora (Laura Soveral). Soveral plays the old woman like a mad specter of old wealth, clad in oversized, designer sunglasses and an ostentatious fur coat. Underneath her amusing caricature, however, are darker impulses, including a gambling addiction that has left her penniless and the racism that manifests itself openly and, in a dream about “talking monkeys,” obliquely. Gomes hones in on Aurora’s rapport with her Cape-Verdean maid Santa (Isabel Cardoso, who quietly seethes with terrifying intensity), using the old lady’s frustrations at her daughter abandoning her and leaving a stranger in her stead to bring out her bigotry. In one moment, Gomes even makes ironic commentary on Aurora’s privileged racism, plunging Santa into shadow to make her even darker as Aurora flips out on her in a two-shot and makes open reference to her maid’s race. Then the director cuts to follow Aurora as she exasperatedly walks out of frame, trapping her in a white sunbeam that subverts the stereotypical moral split of black and white by illuminating what a disgusting person she is.

But she is not the only target of criticism communicated through Rui Poças’ immaculate cinematgoraphy. The first half floats in soft focus, an obvious signifier of the characters’ isolation but meaningful in how broadly the focal lengths are used. Gomes does not simply film Aurora in shallow focus but Pilar as well, cutting the well-meaning righteousness from under her protests and prayers. An early shot in what appears to be one of those restaurants that revolves around a skyline makes for a surreal swirl of blurred, shifting blotches behind the medium-close-up of Aurora as she describes the aforementioned monkey dream, but reverse shots of Pilar only mildly dampen the effect of the background, trapping her in the same headspace. Later, Gomes plays a mild joke on the convictions of Pilar’s activism, framing a close-up on her laptop as she closes out browser tabs before going to sleep. With every click, an article with a provocative political headline on poverty or war is replaced by another. The last tab, though, is a game of solitaire, a reminder that a liberal activist in the West still has comforts and distractions from the Fight.

Those who do not have that luxury can be seen after Aurora passes and an old lover, Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), returns to relate the story of how he and the departed met. Ventura sits with Pilar and Santa in a restaurant decked out in jungle décor, and as he starts his story, the film suddenly jumps across time, space, and film stock to settle back in Africa in 16mm as the young Aurora (Ana Moreira) settles in with her husband (Ivo Muller), only for Ventura (Carloto Cotta) to appear and cause havoc.

The second half represents a slyly comic high in anti-colonial critique. Silent but for Santo’s narration and some diegetic noise (added in such a way as to seem non-diegetic), this portion of the film, titled “Paradise” to complement the first half’s “Paradise Lost,” traces the Western, modernist ennui of the first half to the imperial superiority and colonial wistfulness that informs it. Containing echoes of details scattered throughout the first half, this section is as much a stylized version of Aurora’s backstory as a straightforward piece of context. Gomes even shoots the young lovers’ interactions like a classical silent movie, with faces you can read at 100 paces (especially now that the focus depth increases), wild gestures and melodramatic action.

Less stylized are the shots of the Africans around the white colonials, tending fields or even sharing the frame with the whites and contrasting their stoic, impassive faces with the flourishes of the love triangle. A revolt simmers among them for most of the film, fed by outrage at the ridiculous and destructive solipsism of the romantic drama around them and the climactic act of the triangle acts as the final straw for those who cannot bear to let themselves be ruled by such people any longer as Aurora retreats back to Portugal to eventually pour all of her racial obliviousness out onto one poor woman. Tabu ends in the past, but it offers a radical recontextualization of the present, one that provides understanding for its addled petit-bourgeois elder and complicated new levels of withering criticism of her, and the mood of nationalist regret expressed through her.

Our Beloved Month of August

Miguel Gomes' Our Beloved Month of August is a Möbius strip of swirling contradictions and questions of reality in the vein of Abbas Kiarostami's work, a mix of documentary and fiction that ultimately renders meaningless questions about what is true and what is not. But where Kiarostami's films generally peel back broader emotional truths by lying, Gomes uses his 147-minute triumph of lemonade-from-lemons to lovingly put to screen a part of the world many neglect, including some of the residents of the places spotlighted.


Gomes originally planned to head out to the small but vibrant resort village Arganil in rural Portugal to film a drama that he'd already scripted. But he ran into issues with producers, and when he arrived in town to shoot, Gomes discovered that he lost what meager funding he thought he'd secured. Reasoning that he was already there and might as well shoot something, Gomes switched gears and decided to focus on the music festivals he originally intended to use as backdrop.

Almost instantly, however, Gomes splits the film's diegetic lines, opening with a documented concert and the soundbites of musicians complaining abut power outages and the folk bands playing their danceable tunes to a shot in a cabin miles away. Inside, Gomes is carefully arranging dominoes for an ornate credits sequence, but a "producer" enters in a huff and knocks over a domino, sending the intricate design sprawling. He demands to know what is delaying shooting, unable to see the irony of himself being the reason for the setbacks, his latest involvement on delaying further by ruining the credits setup. (Hilariously, the film then cuts to an every day title card, thwarting Gomes' "intentions.")

For the first half of the movie, Gomes wanders around Agarnil and some surrounding villages as the locals prepare for then have to deal with the incoming tourists. He captures the bacchanalian tone of the endless celebrations, which oddly always seems to follow right behind a religious procession carrying icons of the Blessed Mother. Musicians must make a season's worth of income during August alone, as every village erects a stage where bands play a mixture of rock, folk and dance music, the constant stream of music only stopping for technical difficulties. "There is no dance music," says one musician speaking off-camera as couples head out in a space by the stage to start grooving. "All music is made for dancing." The Portuguese folk is romantic, lovesick entreaties laden with pastoral imagery that celebrates the rustic setting rather than use the throwback sound to focus on something like the working man -- how out of place would a Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie tune sound here, where even the working class can enjoy a month of light debauchery?

If you're paying attention, you can see Gomes laying the foundation for what's about to come, but his earnestness and love for the community he documents is genuine, preventing those reflexive touches of the occasional returns to Gomes and his "producer" motifs rather than intellectualizing removes. In one of those asides, the director talks of moving beyond the script he can no longer shoot -- the exaggerated mass of paper always sits between them like the 800-lb gorilla in the room -- and moans, "I don't want actors, I want people," the sort of pretentious thing Barton Fink would say. But Gomes clearly goes out and finds those people and lets them ramble nostalgically for the camera, all of them relating tall tales of drunken exploits that might just have happened in such a crazy place. A loving but fiery old couple cannot remember how old they even are but have tons of gossip to impart, while another man recalls pissing off some Moroccan vendors who ran him over. When the man awoke from his coma, he discovered he had a new son. It would work as a killer joke in a Coen brothers film, but Gomes lets the moment happen, a half-farcical, half-touching remembrance from a man who still smiles though his teeth were shattered.

A lightly surreal image develops from the various sights on display, from children running through a mass of suds in the town square to the overlapping of motorcycle horn beeps as mopeds zoom down country roads with the big brass of the philharmonic orchestra that marches in the religious procession. These backwoods areas of Portuguese where Iberian hillbillies live are dusty and drab, but the locals create hidden pageants, adding lush texture to dull locations by dint of their lifestyles.

Yet the director's eye for detail also leads him to delve into some of the mild, almost imperceptible issues that such a lifestyle evokes. A city-dweller from Lisbon discusses the xenophobia rural folk feel for outsiders, though her English husband amusingly disagrees. Still, she has a point: Gomes' camera glides fluidly between villages, revealing the shared customs, modes of entertainment and types of people between them, yet there is an undeniable sense of isolationism among these communities against others of their own stripe. Some complain about money issues, but Gomes gently suggests through his visuals that perhaps financial woes might be a result of the incessant drinking and dancing and a certain lackadaisical attitude toward work ethic. By the same token, he rejoices in this love of entertainment and joie de vivre over mind-numbing commitment to work. Seemingly everyone in these villages owns a guitar, and even regular people may burst into song when the mood strikes.

This caring documentation continues through the end of the first half, at which point the entire film folds in on itself. In some of the asides, the producer laments that Gomes' unwieldy screenplay actually grows as the director starts adding more characters inspired by his work in the villages. At last, he decides to film his script after all, using some of the musicians and other locals he spoke to in the first half. Suddenly, what were supposed to be talking heads of real people morph into auditions for the film proper, and the integration of Gomes' observations on village life infuse the narrative with a verisimilitude he surely could not have captured if he simply arrived in town and started projecting onto the residents.

The use of nonprofessional actors telling their own story is nothing new, but Gomes also shanghais them into performing his story, a lurid melodrama with overtones of incest between a musician father and his daughter/muse, Tania. Their constant proximity sets tongues wagging, just as the residents engaged in whispers and rumor throughout. The music Tania and her father play, romantic as all the other Portuguese folk, does not help perceptions, and music gets used against them when two drunken partygoers engage in a duel of insults through song. One man defends the family and attacks the challenger's own familial shame, but the other lout retorts by asking in verse whether the two are father and daughter or husband and wife. To get away from the shame, Tania turns to Heider, a teen ever-clad in an AC/DC T-shirt and slinging a guitar. But Heider is her cousin, and the love she finds to distract herself from the confusing devotion of her father's potentially worrisome adoration could itself be just as harmful.

A few critics have charged the second half of the film with being meandering and too improvisational, but Gomes has too clear a goal in mind for the Our Beloved Month of August to spin off its axis. Despite having no money and a hastily re-assembled screenplay and cast, he inserts some shots that betray a filmmaker who knew exactly what he wanted from the movie. Heider and Tania walk on a bridge, pause and kiss, and as they do, that damned Mother Mary procession comes walking by. Gomes captures them in extreme long shot, the passing line of priests and penitent speaking to the the dogmatic repression that might have shaped these two. But the shot lingers, and behind the usual procession are two giant puppets being walked in line, as if Carnival floats themselves got up in the morning and atoned during Lent like everyone else. The revelry, too, has had its effect. A forest fire that tears through the surrounding area just as sexual tensions may lack for subtlety, but as a comic explosion of visual innuendo, it was as welcome as the close-up of the lava lamp in Talk to Her. Tinier details, such as a stain on Tani'as clothing after a night with Heider that answers whether her father ever touched her inappropriately or the mural of the solar system where Tania occasionally goes with either her father or Heider (suggesting she might be star-crossed lovers with either one), caulk the cracks. If Gomes truly did have to throw out his first idea, he quickly solidified another one.

Our Beloved Month of August examines a well-known fact, that fiction comes from truth, but it also suggests that the reverse is true. Some of the villagers' stories are clearly exaggerations, fish tales delivered to the camera to impress, and the falsity surrounding the truth gets funneled into the film within the film, complicating the fiction until an insight into rural Portuguese life emerges. I admit I'm growing increasingly tired of self-reflexive cinema, mainly because it's become a cheap tool for bad writers to project an aura of multilayered genius when, in effect, they simply recognize their inability to tell a story and try to beat critics to pointing this out. Yet Gomes' film, like the best of reflexive, questionably diegetic filmmaking, gets at emotional truths through the use of intellectual falsehood.

In the ingenious and riotous end credits, Gomes gets into a minor argument with his sound designer for recording "phantom sounds" in the forest fire. Gomes, still clad in that damned, loud red jacket and poor boy hat, allows himself to come off as a petulant auteur, screaming for perfectionism in a movie assembled piecemeal from disparate elements. The crew, who get their credits on-screen next to their actual faces, reassure the boss that no errant sounds are there, but we can hear faint music underneath. The interplay between image and sound that makes Our Beloved Month of August such a delight comes to a head, and the tormenting buzz of barely audible music will drive its mock-severe maker 'round the bend even as it reminds the audience of the music contained seemingly in the hills and trees around these villages. It's both the punchline and the reassurance that this was not all just some joke: the rumble is the soul of the villages Gomes captured, and it will imbue his film whether his pretentious doppelgänger wants it to or not. The perfect bookend to the opening shot of a fox searching for a way into a chicken coop -- the outsider seeking entry for exploitation -- the moment signifies that it is the village that ultimately conquered the outsider, not the other way around.