Phantoms in the African veldt, a melancholic
“intrepid explorer,” a haunted crocodile: these are the enchanting ingredients
of a film watched in a cinema by Pilar (Teresa Madruga) in the opening moments
of ‘Paradise Lost,’ the first part of Portuguese director and co-scenarist Miguel
Gomes’ gorgeous, seductive and strange Tabu.
Pilar is in her 50s; she lives alone in an apartment complex in Lisbon. Her
neighbour, Aurora (Laura Soveral), is in her 80s, seems to be suffering from
dementia, indulges in gambling binges, recounts elaborate dreams featuring
monkeys, and is paranoid and abusive toward her stoic African housekeeper Santa
(Isabel Muñoz Cardoso, so memorable in Pedro
Costa’s Colossal Youth).
Aurora’s
health takes a turn for the worse, and once divested of her clothes and
sunglasses and grooming she begins to take on a very different air—there are
close-ups of her in hospital that recall Dreyer. She asks Pilar to track down
an old man she’s never mentioned before: Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), the
name itself laced with the idea of adventure. Pilar finds Ventura, and Ventura
tells her a story, something that happened 50 years ago, in an unspecified
African country, involving Aurora and him. From here we enter Tabu’s second part: ‘Paradise.’ Young
Aurora (Ana Moreira), a birdy beauty and an excellent shot with a rifle, is
married to a wealthy expatriate plantation owner who can do a nice waltz, becomes
pregnant with his child, but falls in love with young Ventura (Carloto Cotta),
a moustachioed, leather hat-wearing, womanizing drummer in a band that
specializes in Phil Spector covers and for a time found it profitable to play private
gigs for the Portuguese colonial elite—Ventura wants Aurora to be his little
baby, but she’s about to have someone else’s. There are many parties where
firearms are always handy. There are many secret rendezvous, and separations
full of love letters. Riddled with decadence and desire, ‘Paradise’ is as
rapturous and fevered, at times frenetic and tumbling forth, as ‘Paradise Lost’
is meditative and methodical, resigned, with characters often introduced with
their backs or profiles to camera. ‘Paradise’ embraces elements of silent
melodrama, literary monologue and pure montage: there is no audible dialogue,
but we hear select sounds—the sounds Ventura remembers?—along with a dreamy
piano score, and we are guided through all of it by Ventura’s wearied memories
of doomed love.
Miguel Gomes
Appropriating the title and reversing the
diptych structure of F.W. Murnau’s 1931 south seas romance, Gomes’ third
feature is stunningly photographed, formally fascinating, critically engaged
with history—he likes to describe Tabu as
a dysfunctional version of Out of Africa—and,
despite the solipsism and cruelty of the lovers, it is unspeakably moving. It
premiered at Berlin, where it won the FIPRESCI and Alfred Bauer Awards and was
nominated for the Golden Bear. And it was one of my favourites at the Toronto
International Film Festival, where I had the opportunity to speak with Gomes at
the friendly offices of Films We Like for a too-brief but very enjoyable
interview. Tabu is currently showing
in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox and is about to start a full theatrical run in
Edmonton, courtesy of Metro Cinema.
JB: What was the initial inspiration for Tabu?
MG: Someone in my family told me about her
neighbor, a senile old woman, like Aurora. She had a strange relationship with
her African housekeeper. Some of the scenes in the first part of Tabu come directly from stories told to
me by this relative. These kinds of characters, older, lonely women, don’t tend
to have very romantic lives. So we have this story about neighbours doing
relatively everyday things, and then, halfway through, in contrast to this, we
have the second part, the intrusion of a completely different space with
completely different characters. One character, of course, was in the first
part, but now we see her 50 years before, doing what feels almost like the
opposite of what she did in the first part. In the first part there is no
mention of Africa; it’s almost a hidden thing. You can see some masks in
Aurora’s house, but she never talks about Africa. She only discusses Africa
when she gets confused. That’s when she starts to talk about the crocodile, and
people probably think she’s just crazier than ever. I think Africa is the taboo
of the first part, this colonial past. It exists in the Portuguese society
nowadays, but it’s underneath, in the social subconscious.
JB: Given the nature of the second part—the
nature of the story and especially of the storyteller—it makes perfect sense to
me that African characters are largely relegated to the background. But I
wonder if this was ever a concern for you, telling an African story in which
black Africans play what is largely an accessory role.
MG: I wanted to make something like a ghost
film, a ghost film about an extinguishing society, dead or on the verge of
being dead. So we have these white people having fun and killing each other,
and at the end of the film, at the melodramatic climax, Africa takes over.
Literally. The Phil Spector songs disappear and you hear only African music.
From that moment on all the white characters disappear. One of the problems I
have with fiction about colonial times is that it is too often didactic,
inventing characters who come out and say, “Hey, these colonials are not good
guys. They lived in a completely wrong system.” Of course, I share these
opinions, but I don’t think I’m obliged to put things that way. I need to tell
a story with the confidence of knowing that people have some sense that the
colonial system was an unjust system. I think Tabu in any case makes very clear that something is wrong. This guy
is making parties, playing Russian roulette—the people are kind of deranged. But
I don’t have to spell it out for you by having a guy beating an African kid or
something. Too many films make a big effort to say things that to me seem
pretty obvious.
JB: It says something about the tone of Tabu that every act of ostensible
intervention in Africa undertaken by the Europeans seems either ineffectual or
doomed, whether it’s Pilar and her altruistic pursuits, your intrepid explorer,
who really just seems to be searching for a place to die, or the lovers, who,
solipsistic as their actions are, seem to have sealed their fate to some degree
by coming to Africa in the first place. It’s like a curse.
MG: Yes, though I think these are different
things. Pilar’s activities don’t go very far. She can’t fix the world and
neither can Obama; neither can the stupid politicians that are in charge
nowadays in Europe. The world doesn’t seem to be going anywhere nice. There’s a
kind of impotence to what Pilar does. But this curse that you have in the
explorer story and also in the story of the lovers… You know, I made this film-within-the-film
at the beginning of Tabu, romantic,
almost baroque, as a way of signaling what we will eventually return to later.
JB: I admire the structure of Tabu very much. I wonder if the
structure itself helped galvanize you.
MG: Honestly, making a film for me is so
organic that maybe I’m lying when I try to answer these questions after it’s
been made. The script was in the garbage can by the midpoint in the production.
We couldn’t afford to film the things we’d written. So the second part was
improvised. We knew that we’d have these lovers, that Aurora would be at this
plantation, that she would get pregnant—things like this. We knew the basic
story, but we couldn’t shoot the scenes we’d wanted to for lack of money. What
we did then was create a smaller group from within the original crew, which was
already very small—it was me and three people—and we called ourselves “the
central committee.” The job of the central committee was to come up with
something like a menu of scenes. Like in a Chinese restaurant: “Number 122:
Pool Scene.” It was very abstract. They actors didn’t know what any of this
meant. We simply proposed activities, and made up scenes all the time. We’d
complete a day of shooting and then come up with some scenes for the next,
reacting to what we had filmed before. So I can say that from the beginning
there were two parts, working with oppositions: old and young, loneliness and
love, everyday life and a very cinematic life, dialogue and the absence of
dialogue. We had that structure in place, but how it progressed to the final
thing we have now came about largely through the process of making it. The
voice-over in the second part, for instance, was only conceived during
production. I worked with my co-writer and my editor at the same time; we would
edit what we’d shot while at the same time writing and reading out the
voice-over. Something that would normally occur at the beginning of the
process—writing—occurred only at the end of the process.
JB: That’s so interesting, because Tabu ultimately feels like an homage to
oral storytelling—something very rare in movies. Ventura’s voice-over narration
changes how we absorb everything. I think of that scene where Aurora and
Venture are hiking in the jungle and then stop and gaze directly at the camera.
You feel as though the young Ventura is looking at the old Ventura as he tells
his story. There’s the feeling that memory and the process of narration is
changing how everything unfolds.
MG: You’re a very good viewer.
JB: Thanks. It’s a pretty fascinating movie
to view. And listen to. Do you feel invested in this idea of oral storytelling?
MG: I enjoyed having Ventura tell his story
in this kind of strange way. It’s suggested that he might be a little senile
too. He tells the story like it was in a book. It’s strange because he’s
telling the story to two women, the other women from the first part of the
film, but in a way it’s like he’s speaking to himself. Or to the viewers. You
don’t know. But this idea of oral storytelling also comes out of having Santa
reading Robinson Crusoe. I guess in
our lives we have a need for stories and romance. So the second part of the
film feels like a gift to the characters in the first.
JB: Ventura doesn’t really enter the film
until after Aurora dies, so in a sense it’s like he’s taking the baton from
her.
MG: He’s reinventing Aurora. At the start
she just seems like this old woman with Alzheimer’s and probably not very
interesting. And then she becomes a starlet, a character from an American film
or the ’40s or ’50s. Only the narration by Ventura allows for this. That was
there from the beginning, the desire to take an old lady that no one cares
about and then turn her into Katherine Hepburn.
JB: Which is part of what allows Tabu to give us both a generous dose of
romantic cinema and a critique of romantic cinema.
MG: Yes. You can do these things at the same
time. To have this fatigued world and this exotic world. It’s nice to have both
of those things, no?
