Tabu
Tags: flashback

Plot synopsis:
Prologue
A narrator, Miguel Gomes himself, reads in voice-over a poetic and philosophical text that invokes a legend in which the Creator orders, but the heart commands: the suicide of an intrepid explorer who, somewhere in Africa, long ago, plunges into a turbid river after a frustrated love affair and is devoured by a crocodile. Many swear they have seen a beautiful woman and a sad crocodile on the riverbank and that the two share a mysterious empathy.
Part 1—Paradise Lost
Three disparate women dwell in an old building in Lisbon. Aurora, an octogenarian living off her pension, eccentric, talkative and superstitious, seeming more dead than alive, and Santa, her housemaid from Cape Verde, live at the same apartment. Santa is semi-literate, but proficient in the divinatory art of voodoo. Pilar, their neighbor and friend, a Catholic middle-aged woman, and militant social benefactor, involves herself in their psychodramas.
Pilar has another friend, a romantic painter in love, a gentleman who insists on offering her tacky pieces of art. But Pilar is more concerned with Aurora: with Aurora's solitude, with her frequent escapes to the casino. She is even more worried about Santa, with her long silences and devil arts. Santa thinks it better to take care of oneself without annoying others, so keeps quiet.
Something else concerns the old lady: understanding she will die soon, she feels someone is missing her, someone her friends have never heard about: Gian-Luca Ventura. So she asks Pilar to find him. She succeeds in doing so and the man appears. He is an old colonist, a disturbed man, from Mozambique, an ancient Portuguese colony. Another story emerges, beginning: "Aurora had a farm in Africa at the foothill of Mount Tabu..."
Part 2—Paradise
Flashback: The story of Aurora’s life, told by Gian-Luca Ventura in voice over. This part takes place shortly before the Portuguese Colonial War began.
In 1960s Portuguese Africa, Aurora and her husband live together near the Tabu Mountain. She is a skilled hunter, never missing a shot. She owns a small crocodile, a gift from her husband, which moves around the house as a pet.
One day, the animal runs away. The pregnant Aurora finds it in Ventura’s house, where they consummate their existing mutual attraction; a passionate and dangerous love affair ensues. Gian-Luca confides in his friend, Mario, about the affair. Mario demands that Gian-Luca end the affair and when he is ignored, the two start fighting. The heavily pregnant Aurora picks up a revolver and shoots and kills Mario. She later gives birth to a girl. Two days later, Gian-Luca leaves Africa for good.

Review: A vinyl recording of 60s rock 'n' roll echoing over time through generations suggest a nostalgic remembrance of a distant land, which later plays a greater significance in a saga of unrequited love, regret and (literally) life and death.Initially, Tabu is a love story in disguise, a unfinished love story sprawling over a lifetime of passion, regret, duty and propriety.
In it's latter stages it contemplates ideas of memory, unrequited love, ageing, class inequality, prejudice, and European colonialism in African hills and plains.The first part follows the life of an enigmatic elderly woman in contemporary Portugal - titled Paradise Lost - as she goes about her daily life, we learn snippets about her about her prosaic hobbies, simple pleasures, prejudices, idiosyncrasies, detests, and regrets over a sobering simple lifestyle, a long way from the dream life she idolised.
It is a wonderfully romantic and nostalgic yet with an undercurrent on living the edge of a precipice - the dangerous beasts of the African plains, the wild unfamiliar natives and rugged landscape - there exists a sense of tragedy combined with high passion, regret and wild party impulses.Whereas part one is melancholic as it is bitter and comic, the second part contrasts the beauty of youth, the blinding African heat and sun, it exposes the storytelling medium the by abandoning almost all dialogue and all but some diegetic sound effects.
From the frustrating, fussy and capricious Aurora to the charismatic, carefree, jeunesse Ventura and the supporting jaunty characters, each signify the contrasts in class, social status and the colonial class system soon to collapse under political revolution.What is essentially an unrequited love story /melodrama is a charismatic and rollicking passionate ride with some crystal sharp compositions in textured black and white.
Though the entire film is shot in black and white, the two different stories are told in differing stylistic ways, making Tabu a very fitting tribute to cinema itself.
The second half is a rather simple story of an illicit love affair that could never be but is told in an emotionally powerful way, enhanced by the framed narrative structure and deeply mournful narration of who we discover to be the man she loved.
Part two feels like a two sided approach to love of the past; a past loved one and a love of cinema of the past.Despite the main subject of the story at hand, Tabu is not a completely bleak film, the playful use of different cinematic techniques and music are a joy to watch and the catharsis of the ending leaves a feeling of poignancy but not abject misery.
Either way, you won't regret it.Borrowing the name, two-part structure and love affair-plus-colonisation premise from F.W. Murnau's 1931 classic, Miguel Gomes' Tabu is a film of unmistakable vintage.
Whilst she tries to recall her youth with altruistic next-door-neighbour Pilar (Teresa Madruga) and Santa (Isabel Cardoso), a black woman whom Aurora often woefully calls a housemaid/tyrannous witch, the fatalism of the prologue suggests that Aurora will only be able to relive her glory days in the afterlife.Cue part 2, "PARADISE".
It's a time of lost innocence and furtive whispers, so Gomes decides to strip away all forms of diegetic sound, leaving just the bodies and faces of incredible actors Ana Moreira and Carloto Cotta to express this simple, enduring love.Like Leos Carax's comeback success Holy Motors, Tabu is a film entrenched in film history and scholarly technique (unsurprising considering that they both started out as film critics).
Filmed in intoxicating black & white by cinematographer Rui Poças, Tabu is beautifully photographed; from the alarmingly stark opening image of a sweaty explorer looking lost in an African jungle, to the final image of a baby crocodile turning away from the camera and crawling out of frame.
Mixing the deadened silence with ambient sounds, poetic narration and a Portuguese rendition of "Be My Little Baby" (made famous by The Ronettes) the composite sonisphere speaks for the unspoken, tabooed love to exceptionally powerful effect.Because the film's aesthetic is so dazzling, it's easy to lose track of the whimsical storyline.
Just like that film, Tabu isn't a perfect movie, there's pacing issues and Gomes seems to be wrestling with three separate endings.
A KVIFF viewing, the third feature-length work from Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, which was among the contenders for the Golden Bear in Berlin earlier this year, and wound up winning the FIPRESCI Prize and Alfred Bauer Award.The film is entirely in Black & White, which has a deceiving anachronism effect and injects an appeasing vigor to enliven the storyline.
With being equally divided into two parts, the first half is the contemporary story between a middle-aged woman, Pillar and her senior neighbor Aurora (who is live alone with her black servant Santa, and strongly believes her estranged daughter and Santa are plotting against her); the second half is completely B&W silent, with an elaborate voice-over from Aurora's former lover Ventura, revealing a secret history about he and Aurora's love affair back in Africa half an century ago.
It is a distinctively interesting composition, which contributes a pleasant illusion that we were watching a double-feature.But by comparison, the first part is more austere and compelling while the second part is basically about a superfluously hackneyed liaison between a married woman and a romantic womanizer, the only worthiness is that it is between two white people in Africa, and if one intends to get some in-depth probe about the continent and its people, the film could hardly suffices this curiosity.
Teresa Madruga and Laura Soveral are spellbinding during their screen time, if only the second half could be reinterpreted in another way, the film could have been a fabulous essay about love, aging and mystery behind everyone's usual representation..
Portuguese director Miguel Gomes' third feature Tabu takes us on a nostalgic journey that begins in the modern city of today's Lisbon and travels to colonial Africa fifty years ago to attempt to recapture in memory the paradise that was lost.
Shot in black and white by cinematographer Rui Poças and using 16mm film rather than color to establish a time differential, the film reminds us of the romantic movies Hollywood used to make in the 1930s and owes a debt to F.W. Murnau, whose title was borrowed from his 1931 South Seas adventure.Divided into two parts, Tabu's first section depicts an elderly woman, a dreamer beset by remorse and regret, who is fast losing her grip on reality.
The second is the story of an obsessive love set in the shadows of a fictional Mount Tabu in Africa.
Having lost her money at the casinos, Aurora looks to her estranged daughter living in Canada and her neighbor, Pilar ((Teresa Madruga), a staunch Catholic and social activist for financial help but little is forthcoming.
When Aurora is taken to the hospital, she talks about the only time she truly felt loved, the time when she met a playboy and adventurer on her husband's colonial estate back in the sixties.Aurora asks Pilar to find her friend, Gian Luca (Henrique Espírito Santo) and have him come to her one last time, but she dies before he is found in a nursing home.
Surrounded by doting black servants, she is married to a wealthy merchant (Ivo Muller) and pregnant with his child, but her life will change forever when she meets Gian Luca Ventura (Carloto Cotta), a member of her husband's friend Mario's (Manuel Mesquita) rock band and begins a stormy, furtive love affair that will begin and end many times but in the emotions it engenders, it will last a lifetime.Their story is dramatized in the context of a native rebellion, the beginning of the decolonization process that began in 1961 and continued for more than ten years.
At its core, however, Tabu is not a film about history or even about big ideas but an old-fashioned love story that, while perhaps never quite penetrating below the surface of its characters, captivates with its mood, physical beauty, and sense of dream-like mystery.
Honestly, the film started out slow and I wasn't sure where it was going in the first part.The second part cranked up fast and the audience becomes quickly engrossed in Aurora's past and her life in Africa.
One completely understands her melancholy and longing for her past when you compare her farm on Mount Tabu to her life in Lisbon.Aurora's verboten romance with Gian Luca quickly builds up and the audience can feel the longing and how Aurora felt trapped with her pleasant husband.The saddest part for me was when Gian Luca played the drums to the Ronette's song and his entire demeanor is crushed and devastated.The film ends satisfactorily although the tragic ending of Gian Luca's romance with Aurora is well...
Teresa Madruga did great as the audience's eyes and ears.Lastly, I thoroughly enjoyed the use of black and white cinema for the Africa part of the film.
It's a simple story told very unconventionally, with the long slow death of a character in the first half (entitled "Paradise Lost") and then the best years of her life in the second ("Paradise") to the point of where the aforementioned Paradise came to an end.
The camera is sometimes in Antonioni's turf of spatial meditation, sometimes in Herzog's found ecstasy, sometimes in Chris Marker's visual letters from memory.So the fabric of the film is exceptional, that alone would be enough to earn an enthusiastic recommendation from me, but that is the basis for some pretty cool narrative threads, all pointing to storytelling as maps to the life behind the fabric of illusions.The typical reading of the film is that split in two segments, 'Lost Paradise' and 'Paradise', we have an emotionally shattered old woman, and her backstory of much erotic exploration and tragic heartbreak in faraway Mozambique that explains who she was.It is more interesting than that.
They all are intrepid explorers of course, bringing images to life, as are we venturing in the shared journey of exploring the old woman.This device comes first in the film, but it could be taking place at any time.
Once Aurora dies, Pilar and Aurora's maid set off in search for a certain man named Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo) who appears to be a bond between the presence and Aurora's shady past This unorthodox tribute to silent cinema and F.
Nevertheless, the scatter-brained aspect does not perplex that much and the instant the plot drags, the auxiliary visuals come in handy and prevent the material from becoming lifeless.Once Tabu transmutes into a strand of flashbacks derived from Ventura's memory (a part called Paradise), it embarks on being uncannily engrossing and bounteously asserts its aesthetic beauteousness by exposing landscapes of Portugal colonies with its eye-pleasing black-and-white photography.
Young Portuguese director Miguel Gomes plunges us into two narratives that are nothing less than pure poetry.The screenplay and refined narration, the delicate but still frenetic soundtrack that dances through Joana Sá's piano keyboards, the contrasting photography (not new, not old), as well as the roaming melancholy of Lisbon and Africa's landscapes, drive us to a distant, dream-like, almost abstracted dimension."Tabu" is truly a cinematic synesthesia, an artistic portrait that, inexplicably, grabs its viewers from the first minute.
For the duration of its first half, 'Tabu' is one of the most boring films I have ever seen: set in Lisbon, it features a woman worrying about her neighbour, an elderly woman who has been abandoned by her daughter and whose only companionship is her maid.
But things perk up when the old woman dies: we flashback to when she was young and living in a Portuguese colony in Africa, having an affair with a young musician.
The film begins in modern-day Portugal, where an old woman named Aurora (Laura Soveral) is leading a quiet and sheltered life.
The man named by the dying Aurora is the link that brings the two plots together.Although this movie was completed in 2012, it has the look of earlier film.
This is partly because it's shot in black and white, and partly because the director has chosen to remind us that great movies have been with us for many, many years.We saw Tabu on DVD, where it worked well.
In Gomes' film, we begin with a prologue of a Portuguese man's expedition to Mozambique in search of his lover's soul, ending in him being devoured by alligators and being reborn as one, before moving to the first section of the film, titled "Paradise Lost".
After the funeral, Ventura joins with María and Santa and begins telling the story of his affair with Aurora (played by the beautiful Ana Moreira), where he confirms she did actually live in Mozambique, and where he tells of his forbidden romance with her while she was pregnant of her husband's baby.
Here we begin the section titled "Paradise", detailing the story of their affair and of their Portuguese social circle, back when Mozabique was still a colony, which makes up the larger bulk of the film.One of the aspects that surprises outright is just how brilliantly Gomes manages to capture this story from an aesthetic point of view.
Visually the film is of course emulating an older style of filmmaking, right down to the choice of working in an academic ratio (1.37:1), but his visual style is perhaps less reminiscent of Murnau's, and rather seems to emulate 50s Kenji Mizoguchi and early Satyajit Ray. There is that same remarkably organic, unimposing and ever so elegant kind of black and white photography which is harder and harder to find today (even the first half which is filmed in contemporary Lisbon), all the while the film works with a very limited array of sounds and music providing a background for a story told otherwise entirely through the voice-over of Ventura.The voice-over eventually leads to many labyrinthine stories regarding the lives of many people he met in Mozambique, not least the members of his own rock n' roll band, specifically Mario to whom Ventura was a sort of right hand man.
The love story at the heart of it is one forbidden due in large part to the social aspect, that Aurora is a pregnant, married woman, but all throughout the film there's another side suggesting the nature of this affair's forbiddance is also of a divine kind - it is, precisely, taboo.
It borrows its name from an obscure FW Murnau silent, it's filmed in black and white and utilizes two different film speeds, and the entire second half has no dialog, only voice-over.
Well, more precisely, two films.After a brief interlude involving an intrepid explorer, a ghost and a crocodile, Part 1 begins, which is titled "Lost Paradise." It's about three women living in present-day Lisbon -- Pilar, her neighbor Aurora, and Aurora's African caretaker, Santa.
The second half of the film, titled "Paradise," is his recounting of his relationship with Aurora; the entire thing is narrated by him but acted out like something from "Unsolved Mysteries" -- the actors on the screen speak but we never hear their words, only ambient sounds around them.
The film is split into two parts and part one called Paradise Lost where we met Pilar (Teresa Madruga) a retired women living in Lisbon.
Once Aurora dies at the funeral Pilar starts to talk to a strange man named Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo) who knew Aurora when they lived next door to each other in Africa.
The second part then starts and it is called Paradise telling the story of Aurora (Ana Moreira) and Ventura (Carloto Cotta) when they were younger including a forbidden love shared between the two but also how that messed up their lives.The film is shot entirely in black and white but also all the dialogue is Portuguese.
I believe that the first part of the film works better because of awkward some of the scenes feel but also of how Aurora, Pilar and Santa are involved in the story.
The second part of the film does not work as well for me because of many scenes were there is no sound even if we do see the actors speaking, the only words in this part is a voice-over provided by Henrique Espírito Santo as he explains the story being told on screen.
The choice to use black and white I thought was a good choice especially for the second part as it was a flashback we watched and looked like it was filmed on old style film.
The story did get confusing for me at times but I couldn't take my eyes off some of the images especially in the second half of the film.The performances are more needed in the first part of the film because they actually get to speak dialogue.
Laura Soveral playing the older Aurora in her limited screen time gives the best performance in the film.
She just knew how to play this character's descent into madness very well which is why the film is all about her character in the past and in present time.The film does have it's great moments but because of the failings of the second half to set up as much an interesting story as the first the film.
Who wants to see a film that's shot in black and white, is slow moving and its second part is like a silent film?
A Portuguese film in two parts "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise." The bizarre short prologue transports us to a strange world where an intrepid explorer mourning a lost love gets eaten by a melancholic crocodile in Africa.
Aurora for whom the past was a kind of golden age; Santa who has chosen to remain in Portugal and adjust to her new world and Pilar who appears to embrace activist political causes perhaps as a way of atoning the past.The second part is a steamy melodrama that unfolds as a memory sequence involving a young and beautiful Aurora who's stuck in a dull marriage to a rich man in colonial Africa.