Arabian Nights

Arabian Nights is a three-part film directed by the Portuguese auteur, Miguel Gomes.  The work is comprised of three movies, each longer than two hours -- the complete film screens at about 6 1/2 hours.  Gomes' ambition is to show the effects of the great recession as experienced in Portugal -- in effect, the movie is about economic hardship.  That said, Gomes is a witty director and the films are full of surreal touches that lighten the mood.  Furthermore, poverty in Portugal is so picturesque that it is hard sometimes to remain in the dour mood that most of the content requires. 

The first film is entitled The Restless One.  The first twenty minutes introduces the plight of the director faced with this unprepossessing material.  Gomes mopes around a sidewalk café, a sullen-looking slacker similar to the figure that he portrayed, another ne-er-do-well director, in his 2008 Our Beloved Month of August.  Gomes is trying to make a picture about the recession comprised of interviews with laid-off dockworkers intercut with a documentary about a beekeeper hoping to exterminate an invasive species of hornets that are ravaging the local bee population.  Gomes suspects a metaphoric connection between the topics but can't quite figure out what it would be -- in fact, the problem is that the invasive hornet subject has an unpleasantly xenophobic edge that Gomes, I think, can't quite assimilate:  are the hornets workers from third-world countries stealing jobs from the Portuguese or (more disturbing) are the hornets to be equated to Portuguese expatriates working in places like Germany, driven from their homes by the economic downturn.  Gomes can't make sense of the footage that he has exposed:  images of men with torches setting hornet nests on fire and disconsolate shipyard workers standing among empty docks.  So, he tries to literally run away -- we see him walk away from the café and, then, flee at top speed down the street.  Gomes is captured, buried to the neck, in sand and forced to repent his responsibility.  Thus, twenty-five minutes into the film, the title is projected Arabian Nights and the nature of the project announced:  Gomes will make a number of short films, stories after the manner of the tales told Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights.  The project is introduced with some frippery about the Virgins of Baghdad and images of a morose-looking camel.  Then, the first story is narrated:  The Story of the Men with Hard-Ons.  This tale is weak, something about finance ministers who are afflicted with priapism by beturbaned Moor -- it isn't funny or sexually explicit and I couldn't figure out what Gomes meant with the tale.  A little better is the second story:  a tale of love and jealousy set in the picturesque mountains featured in Our Beloved Month of August -- the segment is called The Story of the Cockerel and involves a rooster that crows too early in the morning and is condemned by neighbors for waking everyone up too soon.  This sequence involves some magical realism -- a local Judge in his robes interrogates the cockerel and the beast responds that his crows are a warning cry intended to alert all men to an imminent calamity.  The three lovers are firefighters of the kind that are shown in Our Beloved Month of August -- they patrol the mountains in their brilliantly scarlet engine, the equivalent, it seems, of the rooster, fighting fires that one of the lovers has set out of jealousy at the affair between the other two.  (The lovers are played by pre-pubescent girls who communicate in telegraphic text-messages, another whimsical invention by Gomes that goes nowhere and, even, seems a little creepy.)  The final episode in the film involves a story enclosing three tales nested inside -- a civic booster and swimming coach in a seaside village promotes an annual event called "The Swim of the Magnificents".   This is a kind of "polar bear" plunge of the sort known in many Northern countries -- local people plunge into icy water on January 1, generally as a fundraiser for a charity.  The swimming coach has a bad heart and the opening scene is set in the belly of a whale where a white-coated doctor is supervising an angiogram on the man.  Later, we see the whale from the outside, a disconsolate and battered hulk on the grey beach -- it explodes when people try to approach it, leaving hunks of bloody blubber everywhere as well as a forlorn-looking disgorged mermaid.  The tales nested within the story involve lengthy narrative "talking head" accounts, of how the economic recession has blasted the lives of three of the "magnificents" participating in the plunge.  Most of the surreal aspects of the film, at least in the first part, feel staged and arbitrary and the acting, such as it is, has an amateurish quality -- the documentary elements of the film are more impressive, but they don't really match the Byzantine narratives in which they are embedded.

Each film in the trilogy begins with this title:  "The country was held hostage by a program of austerity by a government apparently devoid of social justice."  The title is necessary because the movies don't exactly illustrate this premise -- Gomes is cunning enough to know that anything that he shows will assume significance in light of his premise; in effect, the meanings of some of the episodes seem to be "accidental" -- scenes can be read as metaphoric of the economic situation but this is not intrinsic, or, even, necessary to what we see.  An example occurs in the second film, The Desolate One.  Between two episodes we are shown an interlude involving girl scouts at some kind of Baroque-era fortification.  The girls, enrolled in some self-confidence building "Outward Bound" program, are encouraged to descend a flimsy-looking rope bridge with the assurance that they are harnessed to the bridge and can not be injured.  Of course, one of the girls slips, the harness fails, and she drops out of sight -- probably, the best metaphor for how Gomes sees Portugal's economic safety net, but, of course, an accidental "objective correlative" and one that passes so quickly that we don't have time to think about it until the film has ended.  Three complicated stories occupy "The Desolate One".  The first involves a bandit named Sirmao "withot bowels" (sin tripas).  The section consists of beautiful landscapes that look like New Mexico with a scowling, bad hombre marching around in the wilderness.  There is no story and the tale ends pointlessly with the bad guy captured by authorities while eating beans for supper; the local populace comes out and cheers for him although Sirmao has killed several women.  (This section is plagued by a surrealist interlude in which three beautiful women go to Sirmao's ruinous lair and have sex with him while engaging in all girl version of Guy Maddin's indelible "Sissy Boy Slap" party -- I have no idea what this is supposed to mean and it seems to be nothing but self-indulgence on the part of the director.)  The second story takes place at night in an amphitheater where a judge is conducting a nightmare trial -- some of the defendants are a genie, five men in African masks who have committed various crimes of theft, a milk cow, 13 Chinese concubines, and an ancient olive tree.  The point of the story is that everyone is implicated in an elaborate web of theft and exploitation -- the trial has begun as a simple case of criminal conversion, a tenant hocking furniture in a furnished apartment to make ends meet, but ends with a cosmic indictment of mutual complicity and criminality that leaves the judge in tears.  Gomes hits his stride with the third story, an undeniably powerful neo-realist portrait of the inhabitants of an apartment block -- apparently, the same apartment building featured in the first section of Tabu.  A fluffy white dog appears, seemingly the reincarnation of a dog that one of the tenants previously owned.  The appealing little dog, Dixie, is described by Scheherazad as a "love machine and a forgetting machine."  The dog passes from owner to owner.  A man and woman who harbor the dog commit suicide after delivering the dog to a junkie and his girlfriend.  The junkie and his girlfriend bring the dog to the building's concierge, the spooky woman from Cape Verde accused of being a witch in Tabu.  Apparently, her friend was the owner of the original Dixie and, in the film's final scene, we see the little dog playing with the ghost of the earlier dog.  This would be purely whimsical except for the fact that when the current Dixie runs off-screen, the ghost dog rolls over onto her side, twitches a little, and seems to die.  This sequence is enlivened with a series of tiny vignettes about the inhabitants of the apartment block, sequences that are strangely moving and enigmatic -- something like the mysterious vignettes comprising Georges Perec's great jigsaw novel Life a User's Manual or a bit like the angelic-tour of Berlin in the first fifteen minutes of Wings of Desire.  This sequence is genuinely moving and, even, its surrealist images -- for instance, torrents of urine running down an elevator shaft -- contribute to the power of this sequence.  Gomes is an inveterate narrator -- he slips tiny narratives into the film's integument.  For instance, one sequence begins with a close-up of a bloody penis -- the man has just deflowered the Judge's daughter.  The girl calls the Judge, her mother, and says that she wants to make a cake for her boyfriend.  The Judge explains how to make the cake before taking the bench in the nightmare trial and warns:  "you could have the Black maid make the cake, but this will lead your man to think that he can get what he needs from her."  A half-hour later, we see a half-naked and voluptuous Black woman cooking a cake in a dark kitchen. 

The third film in the trilogy, The Enchanted One, reverts to the diffuse documentary style of the first installment.  The opening titles remind us that the film is about Portugal's economic malaise but Gomes seems to have, more or less, abandoned any pretense toward developing that subject.  Hermeneutic contortions are required to find any connection to that theme in much of the rest of the film -- by the third movie, there seems to me to be no connection at all, or, perhaps, a perverse negative relationship:  perhaps, the third film shows how people avoid considering the recession by devoting themselves to other pursuits:  the great economic recession seems present in the third film by its very absence.  In L'Age d'Or, Bunuel began his surrealist film with a short, and objective, documentary about the habits of scorpions -- this sequence immediately collided with a religious procession on a rocky shore, lovers grappling in the muck, and some fossilized religious figures.  Gomes follows this procedure at much greater length -- most of the third film is devoted to an objective cinema verite documentary abut raising chaffinches and a competition staged between the singing birds.  For about 90 minutes, Gomes introduces us to various unemployed men who trap the wild birds (illegally) and, then, raise them for the competitions.  This vocation seems always to have been a product of the slums.  Gomes shows us vintage footage of crumbling neighborhoods since replaced by high-rise projects where the chaffinch devotees were raised -- these neighborhoods are adjacent to the airport and, so, in many of the shots we see planes landing and taking off.  One of the chaffinch hobbyists is Vargas, the junkie from the Dixie episode in the previous film and, I believe, it is his bird that dies in the competition.  Truth to tell, Gomes isn't very accomplished as a documentary film maker, or better put, is unconcerned about ordinary narrative -- he doesn't gin up any suspense about the competition, never really establishes its rules, and, for most of the documentary, we can't tell exactly what is happening:  groups of hoodlums stand around small cages covered in white muslin and, unseen, the birds sing -- the competition doesn't have any visual flair:  it seems to be conducted in a vacant lot under some jerry-rigged plastic awning.  One of the birds, perhaps, sings itself to death -- but this isn't clearly depicted.  We learn a few things about finch songs, a couple tricks about catching them, and, then, the documentary simply stops, more or less arbitrarily.  (It doesn't help that Gomes interrupts the documentary with footage of a police strike overlaid with a story narrated by Chinese girl:  she fell in love with a Lisbon cop, he deflowered her -- one of Gomes' favorite motifs -- and, after an abortion, and the collapse of the love affair and, then, a fatal fire,the girl is deported to Beijing.)  A man is caught in the netting used to catch chaffinches -- he turns out to be a genie.  When the chaffinch trapper releases him, he offers the man 10 euros.  The trapper says he needs 10 million euros.  The genie doesn't have that kind of money and so the trapper refuses any pay at all.  Disgruntled, the bird-catcher wanders through the Portuguese landscape; he seems to be the same chap who played Sirmao, without bowels, a figure of the indomitable Portuguese bandit living off the land.  The proceedings are enlivened by various renditions of the song Perfidia (performed by Glenn Miller and Nat King Cole among others) and there is a lengthy whimsical preface involving Scheherazad dallying with a golden boy among the rocky cliffs of a Mediterranean shore -- just as Shakespeare imagined the seacoast of Bohemia, Gomes imagines Baghdad to be a white city on the shore of a gorgeous semi-tropical ocean.  A deep melancholy afflicts the storyteller -- we see her confiding to her father, the Grand Vizier, that she will be out of stories soon and that the King will return to his murderous ways.  There is some dancing and singing, including an utterly bizarre sound cue, a country-western tune called "Son of a Gun" by Lee Hazelwood.  The style in this introductory section is that of Godardian overload -- we get too much information too quickly, titles, voice-overs, songs, in some instances, multiple exposures some of them extremely eloquent, but it all adds up to nothing.   There are hints of other stories that are not developed, something about a great diver and a sunken treasure, and a longing for Bahia, an element of Portuguese nostalgia for its lost empire, but, despite some exquisite imagery, almost too pretty in fact, I couldn't patch this collage together to make much sense of it.  (There is a good gag -- after imprisoning the genie of the wind, Scheherazad pitches her magic lamp into the sea; this upsets a bunch of beach boys diving from the rocks:  "Hey lady! they cry, you can't use the sea as your trash can.)

Ultimately, Arabian Nights seems to me to be a grandiose failure.  The film doesn't cohere and its various parts can't be made to signify anything.  It's a miscellany or grab bag, something conceded in a final title -- Gomes dedicates the film to his eight-year old daughter in the hope that she will extract from it something that she likes.  This is an uncharitable surmise, but all the sound and fury (Gomes production company is called O Som e a Furia) about Portugal's economic recession seems to be nothing but protective coloration, an attempt to impart significance to the film that it doesn't otherwise possess.  Despite some noteworthy sequences, particularly those in the second part of the trilogy, the film is not the masterpiece that critics, eager to support Gomes, have claimed.