TIFF '12: "I wanted to make something like a ghost film...": Miguel Gomes on the two faces of Tabu

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? 

  

Driving that souped-up Buick to the end of love can tear a poor singer in two: revisiting Leonard Cohen's Death of a Lady's Man 30 years on

I’ve long dreamed of writing an essay that would focus solely on a subject of some personal obsession: the great divorce albums made in the broadly defined rock idiom. The list would be necessarily short, as my criteria are severe. Obviously, Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks sets the mould. Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call makes every cut, as does Lee Hazelwood’s Requiem for an Almost Lady and Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear. But whenever I get to thinking about Leonard Cohen, the question isn’t whether he’s got a record that qualifies but which one to choose. Romantic relationships have about as much chance of surviving a Cohen record as a hot turkey sandwich at a teamster’s meeting. Further reflection illuminated the dilemma: Cohen’s one great work of relentless lament for broken love isn’t a record at all, but a book.

Not to be confused with his much maligned but actually quite inventive, weirdly moving and brazenly snappy Death of a Ladies’ Man, the 1977 record produced by Phil Spector, who, more or less insane, apparently homicidal, usually drunk and frequently wielding various weaponry, almost resulted in Cohen’s actual death, Death of a Lady’s Man—a very similar title with a very different meaning—is the volume of poetry Cohen released the following year—yet another entry into this summer’s ongoing theme of under-loved books by famous writers from 1978.

Like all Cohen’s work, it dares to go “to the end of love” and crawl toward some modest redemption. It’s full of humour and eloquence, raw sex and verbal play. Like some of Cohen’s work, it arrives at these elements through endearing feats of irony, bouts of deadpan hysteria and an ongoing sliding between grandiose pomposity and self-flagellation. I would argue it’s some kind of masterpiece, inspired, audacious and gutting, a meta-volume of multiple reflections and sly digressions that arrive at truth through covert means, like bank robbers tunneling in from the basement of the lingerie store down the block.

‘I Knelt Beside a Stream’ opens the collection with mock-heroic language and disquieting allusions to the author’s passive participation in his doomed plunge into love—which, with Cohen, always spells a deadly threat to meditation, mental health and artistic creation. The speaker kneels beside a stream manifesting on a wooden floor in Upper Manhattan, where a feathered shield is placed on his arm, a feathered helmet on his head. “This made me feel so good,” he explains, “I climbed up on Alexandra’s double bed and wept in a general way for the fate of men.” Somewhere in here he finds himself submitting to Alexandra’s suggestion to worship her, which he does for ten years. “Thus began the obscene silence of my career as a lady’s man.”

What immediately follows this poem is of equal importance as the poem itself. Shit, maybe more. Like the vast majority of poems here, ‘Stream’ is supplemented with a commentary written so that it seems the author’s either a separate person from the poet, at least as separate as the incompatible selves at work in Cohen’s double life as artist/ascetic and lady’s man. These commentaries function as a notebook archeology, exposing excerpts from other unpublished writings—especially something called Final Revision of My Life in Art—that deepen or at least perversely twist our reading. Just as often they decry what’s false, preposterous or embarrassing about the poems.

The commentary for ‘The Café,’ where the poet’s taken “a drug that makes me want to talk,” expands on the six-lines of verse with an explanation as to what happened to the titular locale: “Upon inquiry, I discovered that it had been demolished and the marble tabletops thrown into the harbour.” The evidence of Cohen’s actions cagily described in the poem has been lost to time. Implied is some willful amnesia, a way of escaping feelings too complicated to sort out in the reasonable, detached approach of the commentator, the poet’s adversary, the aggressive apologist for this book which had already been sent to Cohen’s publisher and pulled from publication several times before.

With its vague resemblance to Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the doubling structure offers resolution found only through cold self-analysis and a balm for the reader upset by the author’s surges of violent resentment and reeling marital anxiety, ie: “You fucking whore, I thought you were really interested in music.” Gradually, however, we realize the commentator is as susceptible to emotional torrents as the poet. He too becomes illucid, digressive, overwhelmed by his project. The disparate personae of these two Cohens slowly collapses, the commentator finally tossing out fragmentary statements as enigmatic as the book’s briefest poems: “They should cast your cunt in chrome for the radiator cap of a Buick.” (Why a Buick? I’ve always wondered this. Perhaps you’d have to be a motorist in 1978 to get that.)

There is a narrative poem about carrying luggage and waiting for a boat with one’s wife that never fails to sweep me up. There’s a poem where the flow of Montreal traffic is narrated as an unsuccessful attempt at forgetting a woman. There’s one that gives the finest advice on performing poetry since Hamlet, and one ostensibly authored by Cohen’s spiritual mentor that is the best piece of verse ever written about a cricket’s girlfriend. And there is a lovely pair of poems quite near the end that steps back from emotional clamour to take note of a nine-year-old girl’s face that appears in the window and stares. Though typically spare, the shape of Death of a Lady’s Man is unruly, suitably so, fraught with alienating effects, yet few chronicles of disastrous love pierce the heart so brutishly. Cohen’s time as a lady’s man didn’t actually kill him, or his art. But something always dies in such melees, just as something of the other always burrows within us afterwards. I’m grateful that he took this fatalist metaphor to such sumptuous extremes. He really took off the kid gloves with this one.