Past Is Present Yet Irretrievable

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/movies/tabu-newest-genre-breaker-from-miguel-gomes.html

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LISBON

THE Portuguese director Miguel Gomes makes a virtue of category confusion. He likes to call his films “musical comedies,” which is an apt enough phrase if each word is broadly defined, but he also speaks of them in terms of “mutation” and “contamination.” Their signal attribute is their unpredictability; they often seem to start in one genre and end in another.

In his first feature, “The Face You Deserve” (2004), a frustrated children’s entertainer dreams his way into a warped version of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” His second, “Our Beloved Month of August” (2008), begins as a documentary about the folk customs of rural Portugal but gets progressively odder as its subjects become characters in an encroaching fiction.

Mr. Gomes’s latest film, “Tabu,” which opens in New York on Wednesday, is his most ambitious shape shifter yet. The first section, set in contemporary Lisbon, is the story of Pilar, a devout do-gooding spinster who attends political rallies, haunts movie theaters and indulges the temperamental behavior of her elderly neighbor, Aurora. With the appearance of a man from Aurora’s past, the film travels to the misty mountainside plains of a Portuguese colony in Africa decades earlier to tell the story of a bygone romance in the obsolete language of an old movie.

Asked a few months ago why he so often makes films with two-part structures, Mr. Gomes, a former critic whose deadpan sense of humor is evident both in person and in his work, said, “What counts is the third part, which does not exist in the film but is produced in your mind.”

During a wide-ranging conversation that began over lunch here at a seafood restaurant and continued over a bottle of vinho verde at a hotel bar perched on the city’s highest hill, Mr. Gomes returned several times to the notion of cinema as a participatory art. “We talk about the point of view of the director, but the most important point of view is the one of the viewer,” he said. “A film should have a space of freedom for the viewer.”

“Tabu,” which dispenses with dialogue for half its duration, certainly gives the audience room to roam. Mr. Gomes said he did not set out to make a film in Africa or about colonialism. “I’m a collector,” he said, explaining that his movies come together from fragments of inspiration. One unlikely spark this time was a song he used in “Our Beloved Month of August” by a Portuguese band popular in 1960s Mozambique. When he met the musicians, he was struck by their unapologetic nostalgia. “They sounded so attached to this colonial regime,” he said. “But what they were missing was their youth.”

“Tabu” took shape as a movie about “extinguished things,” he said, “dead people, lost societies, a form of cinema that no longer exists.” The second half is a silent film of sorts. While we hear ambient noises on the soundtrack, the actors’ words are drowned out, replaced by the wistful voice-over of an old man named Gian Luca, the love of Aurora’s life, recalling their illicit affair as pretty young things in a faraway land.

Shot in radiant black and white by the cinematographer Rui Poças, “Tabu” abounds with cinephilic allusions. The film’s title and its chapter headings, “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise,” come from the 1931 movie by F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty, a hybrid of poetic ethnography and romantic tragedy. There are nods to safari adventures (“Hatari!”) and colonial love stories (“Out of Africa”).

But while “Tabu” concerns the irretrievability of the past, it also affirms that the old can be made new and strange and that blatant artifice can produce genuine emotion. Its prologue — a fanciful vignette about a grieving hunter who throws himself to the crocodiles — turns out to be a movie that Pilar is watching. “At the beginning this feels a bit overdone,” Mr. Gomes said. “But what ‘Tabu’ tries to do is invent a path to get you to that same romantic mood.”

Steeped in the yearning melancholia that the Portuguese call “saudade,” “Tabu” is also further evidence that the country is home to one of Europe’s richest film cultures. The relative isolation during the Salazar dictatorship and the near total absence of a commercial cinema, among other factors, have fostered a hospitable climate for distinctive, risk-taking auteurs, including the venerable Manoel de Oliveira (who turned 104 this month) and João César Monteiro and, more recently, Pedro Costa and João Pedro Rodrigues. As Mr. Gomes put it, “It’s the only advantage of being poor: We could afford a greater amount of freedom than if we were richer.”

But the current situation, with Portugal’s economic woes deepening, is not as rosy. The law on film financing is in flux, and state subsidies crucial to production have dried up. Luís Urbano, a producer of “Tabu” who has worked on several films with Mr. Gomes, said the recent tumult has been hugely disruptive. “What we’re fighting for,” he said, “ is a return to a cultural policy that defends the diversity of the films, something that the very small local market can hardly provide.”

“Tabu,” one of the most widely lauded movies on the festival circuit this year, was also shortlisted for a European Parliament award for films that resonate with the “public debate,” an apparent acknowledgment of its unusual approach to the ever thorny subject of colonialism. “In Portugal when we talk about colonial times, we’re obliged to do a speech about how bad it was,” Mr. Gomes said. “But to me that’s something we know.”

Instead “Tabu” evokes the seductions and delusions of the colonial fantasy. “Her growing belly is like a time bomb,” Mr. Gomes said, referring to Aurora’s pregnancy. “It’s like the political situation of the time. Every other country in Europe had given independence to the colonies, but in Portugal there was still a denial of reality.” (The African section of “Tabu” was shot in Mozambique, a Portuguese colony until 1975.)

In the original “Tabu,” “Paradise,” which depicts an island idyll, comes before “Paradise Lost,” which shows the corrupting force of civilization. Mr. Gomes reverses the order. We see the gloomy aftermath first, which makes the colonial setting of the second half a highly ambiguous paradise. The bittersweet logic of the chronology also means that the exuberant second half functions as a gift for its characters and viewers alike. “In all my films there is an urge for fiction,” Mr. Gomes said. “There is a first part that begs for another film to appear, and it does because of our common desire.”

Mr. Gomes peppers his conversation with well-turned aphorisms on the power of film: “Cinema was made to reunite the visible and the invisible”; “Cinema can record not only things that exist, but things we project.” Some have said that cinema is in its death throes. A filmmaker like Mr. Gomes suggests that a deep faith in the medium and its possibilities is all it takes to prevent its extinction.