Miguel Gomes is a Portuguese film maker, born in Lisbon in 1972. He is a product of the Lisbon film school. Apparently, Gomes worked as a film critic, began making short movies, and progressed to feature-length films in the first decade of the new millennium. I don’t know anything about his personal life, although I gather he has a daughter, eight years old, from a dedication at the end of Arabian Nights (2015).
Gomes first feature film was The Face you Deserve (2007). The movie concerns a schoolteacher’s 30th birthday on which he fantasizes interactions with seven children, all of them alter-egos. The movie is identified as a comedy and was, apparently, reasonably successful in Portugal but was not exported.
In 2008, Gomes directed Our Beloved Month of August. This film is a mixture of documentary and fiction. The picture concerns a director who travels to a provincial city to make a slasher/horror film. Funding evaporates and the director abandons the fiction film for a documentary about a music festival underway in the town. From the documentary, however, there gradually emerges a narrative involving two young girls, their families, and boyfriends – ultimately, the film becomes a kind of domestic melodrama, complete with a crowd-pleasing climax involving a forest fire. Widely successful in Europe, the film was shown in international film festivals and is highly regarded.
IMDB shows that Gomes appeared in, or directed, several short pictures, including a made-for-TV movie. I have seen some of them. One called Redemption purports to consist of private memoirs from several European leaders including Nikolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. This 26 minute film is very powerful and suggests that Gomes’ true metier may be short, highly poetic films of this sort.
Tabu was released in 2012. At its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the movie was widely acclaimed. It was exported to the world – in the Twin Cities, the picture was shown three or four times at the Walker Art Center but had no broader release except for some New York and California art-houses. Tabu was presented at both the Toronto and New York International Film Festivals and there are interesting interviews with Gomes made at those venues and available on You-Tube.
Gomes followed Tabu with the wildly ambitious, six hour film Arabian Nights (2015). The film is nothing less than an attempt to capture the essence of Portuguese society in the throes of economic recession through a series of documentary, parable, and fiction sequences all knit together as tales told by Schezerahad over a thousand-and-one nights. Most critics regard this film as an extraordinary, if, sometimes, baffling accomplishment. I am less sanguine about the picture. Despite some remarkable passages, the trilogy of films can not be made to cohere and, in fact, seems to slip off topic to the extent that, at the end of the last picture, the viewer has no idea what the film is about or why it was made – the 6 and ½ hour movie ends with a ninety minute documentary about songbirds, a chaffinch competition held in a poor part of Lisbon; although some critics have heroically tried to develop a theory that unifies the trilogies disparate elements, their efforts, in my view, are completely futile and unconvincing. At heart, Gomes is a surrealist – this is, at once, his strength and weakness: his imagination is fantastically fertile and he invents incredible images and situations, but these inventions seem to exist, in large part, to outrage or bewilder the audience.
Gomes’ pictures are generally constructed as individual narrative sequences that stand apart from one another. The task for the viewer is to discover how the individual narratives fit together and what they mean collectively. For instance, The Face you Deserve begins with sober journalism – a documentary-like study of a teacher and his associates, students and friends. The second-half of the film is more freely constructed and seems to be a daydream experienced by the protagonist. In Our Beloved Month of August, half the film involves the ill-fated effort to shoot the slasher picture and the collapse of that project; the film’s second part is a joyous, semi-documentary account of a music festival in the town where the film crew is stranded that slowly evolves into a melodram. Tabu and Arabian Nights follows this pattern.
Little is published concerning Gomes personal life or background. Interviews show a swarthy handsome man (he often acts in his own films) with an intense demeanor. Gomes speaks in a soft voice in excellent English. He appears impatient with interviews and swings his right foot, draped over his left leg, nervously while speaking. There is are two very funny shots of him in Arabian Nights – in one shot, he is buried up to his neck in sand as punishment for fleeing the film set; someone puts a cigarette in his mouth that he morosely smokes. In the other shot, Gomes is standing under a ferris wheel dressed as a seedy Baghdad sultan – he has a ratty looking turban, seems unshaved, and is smoking in that image as well.
2. While making Our Beloved Month of August, Gomes encountered some older musicians who had been famous for their performances in Mozambique. In Africa, these musicians performed their own music and covers of Beatles and Phil Spector tunes. The men performed wearing white suits and their records were famous in the Portuguese colonies. This band was part of the inspiration for Tabu.
3. Another inspiration for Tabu was story that Gomes was told about a strange relationship between an older woman and her housekeeper, a woman from Cape Verde. Gomes heard this story from a family member who attributed the events told to some neighbors. The story involved mysterious events attributed to the witchcraft or voodoo of the African maid, a person thought to be a powerful witch.
4. The original title of the film was Aurora, that is, the picture was named after the old woman whose story is recounted in the second half of the film. The Romanian film maker, Cristii Puliuu, had just released a movie named Aurora and, so, Gomes changed the movie’s name to Tabu.
5. One of the financiers for the film is ZDF (Zum Deutschen Fernsehen – German TV). The money-men at ZDF demanded that Gomes shoot the African sequences in color 35 millimeter. "Africa is beautiful," the Germans said, "and you need to capture that beauty in your film." Gomes said no. He told the Germans he wanted the film to look like the old Tarzan productions with Johnny Weismueller – "those films are beautiful, are they not?" Gomes asked. The Germans reluctantly agreed with this argument.
6. The first half of the film is shot on black 35 millimeter stock in the pillar-box ratio used in silent films like Tabu by Murnau and Metropolis. The second half of the film preserves the silent aspect pillar box ratio, but is shot on 16 millimeter stock – this is intended to give the second half of the movie a "dreamy," slightly "out of focus" look.
7. The second part of the film was shot on location on a tea plantation in Mozambique. Typically, Gomes does not use professional actors or actresses. He just had crew members play roles in the narrative. "I made it look like a period film," Gomes says, referring to the fact that the film is set in the sixties, "by having the men grow moustaches."
8. Gomes says that the film is about those things that are fading away, becoming lost, dying and extinct. Thus, the film involves Aurora’s death, the lost Portuguese colony in Mozambique (with a nod to the lost colony in Cape Verde), as well as black and white film stock. Gomes has commented on the difficulty of acquiring black and white film stock on which to shoot the movie – "everything is made digitally today," Gomes says, "without film at all." The other obvious aspect of the film is that it celebrates a "kind of film that has been extinguished," Gomes says – that is, silent film. The kind of film that no longer exists, Gomes characterizes as "the youth of cinema – the film that does not exist any more". In that context, he refers to John Ford movies like Mogambo (another picture set in the jungle), Howard Hawks, and, of course, F. W. Murnau’s movies.
9. Murnau’s Tabu is a "greatly underestimated film," Gomes proclaims. It is "at once the most controlled and most open of all films." Murnau was a director who obsessively controlled his films down to the slightest detail. And, yet, on Tabu (1930), Murnau worked with the documentary film director Robert Flaherty and used native people in Tahiti for his actors. Accordingly, Gomes sees Tabu as a paradigm of a film that is both tightly controlled and disciplined, but also improvisatory – it is part documentary, part fiction, and, like Gomes, pictures uses amateur actors. Gomes indicates that he values films that are, at once, tightly designed and structured but, also, open to improvisation and that use non-professional actors.
10. About ten years ago, I noticed something unusual. In the Lutheran hymnal, new songs appeared identified as originating the Taize Community. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is swift to adopt ecumenical stances and anxious to broaden its lily-white constituency into other colors and ethnicities. For that reason, there are a number of hymns from Mexico, South America and Africa now printed beside the tunes written by Bach, Luther and Isaac Watts. I assumed that the Taize Community was some peculiar group of Protestant Africans or Lutheran Hondurans. In fact, the Taize Community is an ecumenical monastic order headquartered in south France at Taize. The order was founded by Roger Schuetz, a Swiss Lutheran, in 1940 and, now, has adherents around the world. Schuetz was the son of a Swiss pastor, born in 1915. He was inspired by stories about his maternal grandmother opening her home to war refugees during the Great War. When World War II erupted, Schuetz, with his sister, opened a "safe house" for people displaced by the war a few kilometers beyond the "zone of demarcation" – that is, the border between Vichy and Free France. Schuetz used the house for smuggling Jews out of Vichy France, an activity that was discovered by the Gestapo with the result that Brother Roger, as he was now known, had to flee back into neutral Switzerland – he spent the balance of the war at Geneva, returning to Taize, France in 1944 in the wake of the Allied advance into that country. After the war, Brother Roger continued to gather disciples at Taize, where he founded an ecumenical and celibate monastic order combining Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions. The Taize Community grew, particularly as a result of its youth programs and has become one of the largest religious movements in Europe. In 2005, there were 100 monks at Taize and the village was an important pilgrimage site. Brother Roger was stabbed to death in 2005 by a mentally ill Roumanian woman – he was ninety years old.
11. The Taize Community European meeting, held annually, took place in Lisbon between 28 December 2004 and 1 January 2005 – according to its website, Taize annual meetings always straddle the end of the year. The subject of the meeting was "The Urgency of Peace" and it was attended by 120 youth leaders, including many from Poland (there is a large Taize community in Poznan) and Eastern Europe. Near the beginning of the film, we see the protagonist of the first part of the picture, the kind and gentle Pilar, waiting at the airport for the Polish girl who is supposed to stay at her house. At Taize meetings, the participants live with families in the host country.
12. An important tradition in European literature is the novella, a literary form longer than a short story but more compact than a novel. Many famous European novellas employ the narrative device of a frame story. In the frame story, a character, often speaking in the first person, encounters an unusual person. This person seems afflicted in some way and has been marked by great passion or suffering. The protagonist of the frame story is usually a gentle and kind person, a representative of the ideal reader. The protagonist asks the person encountered what has happened to them and the balance of the novella consists of the story recounted by that person. Innumerable novellas in the German tradition take this form; two of the greatest practitioners of this kind of narrative are the Swiss writer, Adalbert Stifter, and the north German, Theodor Storm. Sometimes, the novella narrative is a document, or a series of documents – for instance, a diary or a group of letters discovered by the protagonist. I mention this tradition because the outstanding exemplar of this kind of writing in the last quarter century is another German, albeit an expatriate, W. G. Sebald. (We read Sebald’s book The Emigrants in our group). Sebald, in turn, seems to have been an enormous influence on Gomes. The shape of Tabu seems derived from Sebald’s narrative techniques – in Sebald’s books, a first-person protagonist goes somewhere, entering a eerie depopulated and devastated landscape. In that landscape, the narrator encounters a person characterized by a terrible melancholy, disabling depression that sometimes leads to suicide. The narrator gradually learns the person’s story and discovers the causes for the melancholy, the vast sadness embodied both in the wounded individual encountered but, also, in the abandoned and ruinous landscape. One of the pleasures of reading Sebald’s texts, sprinkled as they are with black and white photographs that supposedly document the events described (but that could be really about anything), is piecing together the thematic and historical relationships between the frame-story and the narrative. A novella constructed in this way is literally resonant – that is, the themes and events in the frame story resonate with, and give meaning to, the narrative enclosed by the frame and, of course, vice-versa, the frame deepens and complicates the narrative embedded within it. In Tabu, current history frames the colonial past and there are numerous cross-references between Lisbon’s present and the events narrated by Gian Luca Ventura. In the movie theater, Pilar and her gentleman admirer hear Ronnie Spector’s "Be My Baby", a song played by the rock and roll combo in Mozambique forty years earlier; Gian Luca Ventura tells his story in an atrium decorated with tropical plants, a place something like the Rainforest Café; in a deserted mall, we see a child’s ride shaped like a crocodile, referring us to the baby crocodile whose escape triggers the fatal love affair. (Novellas in German are said to feature a turning point called a "Falcon" after a famous story by Goethe – the "Falcon" is the unerhoerte Begebenheit ("unheard-of event") that generates the story. Following this pattern, the escape of the baby crocodile, an unusual event, gives occasion to the forbidden romance that is the subject of the second half of the film.) Pilar’s rejection of her gentleman admirer’s romantic pleas resonates against the romantic diction of Ventura’s narration and Aurora’s submission to her handsome lover. Gomes insures that the viewer enjoy a complex and intriguing set of cross-references between the frame and African romance – even small details contribute to this cross-indexed system: for instance, recall that Aurora’s father lost a fortune gambling, an addiction that seems to afflict Aurora as well, at least in her dotage. Ultimately, Gomes’ point is simple but profound – Faulkner said it best in Requiem for a Nun: "the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past." Present-day Lisbon bears the traces of Portugal’s colonial past – the colonial past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past. Thus, Tabu insists upon establishing an extensive set of connections that weave together Lisbon’s present-day mystery and melancholy with the savage and intensely romantic past of Portugal’s lost colonial empire.
12. An interesting aspect of Tabu is the fact that, in many ways, modern day Lisbon is more exotic, enigmatic, and inexplicable than Africa. The tea-plantation in Mozambique presents a coherent space, organized around the steep, brooding thumb of Mount Tabu. Locations are efficiently depicted by establishing shots that show us where the characters are located – indeed, the adjacency of locations is central: the escape of the baby crocodile onto the property occupied by Ventura and his band-mates is a crucial element of the narrative. Africa is bright and sunny. By contrast, Lisbon is murky with rain and mist. Locations are uncertain, even, baffling. During the old Aurora’s first long monologue, a speech in which we detect the onset of her dementia, both actresses seems to be on some kind of turntable rotating in a circle in the casino – this curious effect is never naturalized, never explained. Transitions in Lisbon are made without warning – the most remarkable effect of this sort is the scene in which we are suddenly in some sort of subterranean tunnel: Pilar and her suitor wear miner’s helmets with carbide lamps. The tour-guide makes a suggestion that is hard to interpret, something about burying a large number of corpses that engenders an inexplicable outburst from Pilar’s gentleman admirer. Where does this scene occur? What is it about? Why are the protagonists suddenly deep underground? This episode is completely disorienting, but implies that Lisbon is a city of dreadful night, perhaps, even a kind of Hades, a realm of the dead and dying. Voodoo is thought to be at work in modern-day Lisbon. Santa, the black housekeeper from Cape Verde, is possibly a witch. In one shot, we see caricatured silhouette figures of black women, a kind of decorative wall-hanging in Aurora’s apartment and, of course, a reference to the colonial past. Later, Santa is shot in silhouette, a similarly pitch-black form hovering over the pale and vulnerable Aurora. Lisbon seems strangely deserted, a city of empty parks and vacant cemeteries. Pilar, a kindly liberal, supports all kinds of good causes – despite her Catholic piety, she is also probably a Taize community member. But the good causes that Pilar supports are incomprehensible – in one scene, Pilar protests genocide and chants the completely enigmatic phrase in English "Shame ONU" – does this mean, something called ONU should be ashamed or is she saying "shame on you"? In another scene, Pilar is lectured by a cigarette-smoking female professor – the woman speaks in dense jargon and her side-kick berates Pilar for handing her a marker that is the wrong color. What is this all about? In Gomes’ vision, the colonial past is more luminous, vivid, and explicable than the rain-sodden foggy present.
13. Gomes’ Tabu asserts a puzzling relationship between the personal and the political. Aurora kills a man who is attempting to intervene in her adulterous relationship with Gian-Luce Ventura – the dead man is one of Ventura’s band-mates. Aurora’s husband removes the body and blames the killing on native rebels – indeed, Tabu suggests that the Portuguese Colonial War (1964 to 1975) began as a result of an obscure love-affair on a tea plantation in Mozambique. Aurora’s adultery, accordingly, has consequences far beyond those that are personal to her – in fact, her affair seems to trigger a destructive 11 year conflict with a dire effect on Portugal. I am uncertain as to whether this cause-and-effect relationship is rooted in some kind of reality or intended to be allegorical or, merely, a surrealist joke.
14. Portugal was ruled by a weak and moribund king until the 1908. At that time, King Carlos I and his young son, the heir to the throne, were killed by assassins in Lisbon in a spectacular regicide – the Queen fought the assailants with a bouquet of roses that she was holding. A short-lived republic was instituted. The late 20's there was civil unrest and, ultimately, a military junta seized power ending Portugal’s so-called First Republic. The Second Republic, also called the Nova Estado was led by a dictator, Antonio Salazar, a conservative "para-fascist." Salazar steered a third course between Communism and Fascism – his government was, more or less, neutral in World War II (although he gave covert support to the Allies by allowing the International Red Cross to operate out of Portugal). Salazar’s regime mirrors Franco’s Spain – Salazar was pro-Catholic and highly conservative. The motto of his State as Deus, Patrie, Familie, an obvious rebuke to the French Revolution’s slogan: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. "We are against all forms of internationalism," Salazar declared. Salazar’s emphasis internationally was on retaining Portugal’s colonies. Indeed, Portugal was one of the last countries in the world to relinquish its once mighty colonial empire. Beginning in 1964, the Portuguese military fought doomed campaigns against guerilla insurgencies in Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea. These wars were so unpopular that over a million of Portugal’s young people fled the country to work in Europe or the Americas in order to avoid conscription in these nightmarish Guerra de Ultramar. Salazar had a stroke in 1968 and was without a successor. Chaos ensued and, in 1974, the Portuguese military again seized power in the so-called Carnation Revolution. The army promptly abandoned its wars in Africa and the independence of Portugal’s remaining colonies rapidly followed – for instance, Angola and Mozambique were declared independent in 1975.
14. In classical surrealism, effects are achieved by the creation of chimera – that is, combinations of images, words, or ideas that do not seem to belong together. The most famous statement of this doctrine derives from the proto-surrealist Comte de Lautreamont’s statement that his poetic practice was akin "to the chance meeting on a dissecting table of an umbrella and a sewing machine." Andre Breton wrote that surrealism should liberate the subconscious by dream analysis in which "one could combine, inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects." The French surrealist poet, Pierre Reverdy called for the "juxtaposition of two, more or less distant realities... that achieve emotional power" by being combined. According to this dicta, Gomes seems to me to be primarily a surrealist. Whereas a surrealist poet might create his effects by linking incongruous words together, or surrealist film makers might yoke together in one frame a dead donkey and piano (Bunuel and Dali in Un Chien Andalou), Gomes operates by juxtaposing narratives and entire sequences of film that are rooted in wholly different realities. His objective, I think, is to create a surrealistic chimera, an uncanny effect that destabilizes our assessment of the two narrative realities presented. In Tabu, Gomes creates occasional surrealistic effects in the style of Bunuel and Dali – for instance, the image of the ghost in long gown with the alligator in the opening scenes of the film. In general, however, Gomes relies upon the vivid contrast between the scenes in present-day Lisbon and colonial Mozambique to create surrealist effects – he exploits the contrast between frame-story and colonial narrative to destabilize both aspects of the film. Lisbon seems vacant, ghost-like, empty, uncanny in light of Portugal’s colonial and imperialist past; similarly, Mozambique seems unreal when compared with modern-day Portugal.
14. The inhabitants of the apartment tower in Lisbon appear once more in Gomes’ Arabian Nights. Indeed, the best episode in the loose and baggy Arabian Nights involves the reincarnation of a dog and a suicide pact in the apartment complex.
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