Gomes's Tabu Challenges Colonial Africa Misgivings

Mario lip syncs (of course, it's silent film !) Joey Ramone poolside

poolside dancing so "Blue is Warmest Color"

local joyous children surround devastated Ventura with tribal "call & response" choir blasting, sublime moment

Murnau's 1931 film

Tabu is a 2012 Portuguese black & white film directed by Miguel Gomes, the title in honor of and  referencing F.W. Murnau's 1931 silent film, which took place in the South Pacific.  Both films have a bifurcated structure.  Tabu is in two parts, with intertitles Paradise Lost, and Paradise, the first part taking place in contemporary Lisbon and the second part a flashback of 1960s Portuguese Africa.  The implication is that life was much better in colonial times.  Murnau's film was also in two parts, but chronological, flipping the chapter headings. Portugal was the last surviving colonialist country in Europe, finally relinquishing Mozambique (and Angola) in 1975, where Tabu was filmed.  The overarching theme is obsessive love and eternal pain that results from its extinction (think Blue is the Warmest Color featuring Lykke Li's song "I Follow Rivers").

The film is wildly inventive in the use of sound (and lack thereof).  Richard Brody, who calls this one of the most original movies in years, brilliantly summarizes Gomes's vision in The New Yorker (my bold):

Gomes’s vision, realized in calmly expansive, keenly perceptive compositions in a charcoal black-and-white, is two-fold. First, he reveals a rational modern Europe of noble yet sterile passions, of moderate pleasure, impotent principle, and economized energy; of an aestheticized dignity that is ever so slightly out of sync with the tawdry mercenary activity of daily life. Several moments leap out—there’s a magnificently sensitive tracking shot that moves in on Pilar during an awkward moment outside a movie theatre, when her suitor wants to offer her a painting; as he dashes off, the chirp of his remote car key is heard, twice. There’s also a delicately sardonic aperçu in a shopping mall, where, at a moment of high emotion, Pilar and two others head for a café through a corridor where Gomes discerns, in jolting centrality, a sad little ride for children. 

Second, Gomes sees the predatory injustices of colonial life as a sort of Wild West of anarchic self-indulgence and self-reinvention, a perfect environment for romance to flower and to grow to monstrous, untenable dimensions. Nothing suggests nostalgia for or ambivalence about Portugal’s colonial empire. The narrator of the second part, an Italian immigrant, is clear-eyed about the indecent inequities that he took advantage of, and it’s among the sins for which the modern Portugal of Pilar’s circle is in lasting penance. But the very vastness of its cavalier moral obliviousness is one of the things that vanishes with the clarity of vision; amour fou comes off inextricably linked to diabolical evil (which is explicitly invoked in the narration), and the humanist’s circumspect, responsible politics appear also to put relationships on an ethical footing and to put a brake on the emotional life—without completely extinguishing the inner spark of spontaneous extremes.

Derek Smith observes (Tiny Mix Tapes):

In Africa, young Aurora lives a carefree life as a spoiled white girl with a caring, successful husband and is known as the most talented big game hunter around. With the entrance of Ventura, a handsome playboy extraordinaire, the flames of illicit love begin to crackle and the two begin a torrid love affair. The aforementioned techniques used in this part of the film, particularly the soundscapes playing against muted dialogue, give the characters a feeling of disembodiment that reflects both the two lovers’ states as they enter and proceed with their obsessive affair and the sense of dislocation and disillusionment as Ventura nostalgically recounts the tale he’s revealed to no one for 50 years.

Soundtrack is excellent:

Variações Pindéricas Sobre a Insensatez by Joana Sá

Cosi Come Viene by Conjunto Oliveira Muge

Baby I Love You by The Ramones (another connection with Blue is the dance sequence)

Tú Serás Mi Baby by Les Surfs

Lonely Wine by Mickey Gilley

The eldest 6 of 12 children were Coco, Pat, Rocky, Dave, Monikya (Monique) and Nicole Rabaraona. Born in Madagascar the four brothers and two sisters performed as the vocal group "Les Surfs" from 1963 to 1971.

Grupo de Canto e Dança do Povoado de Coconhoa (Mozambique) performed the "call & respond" tribal chanting.  This mesmerizing sound takes center stage when Araura's husband fetches her and takes a wack at Ventura.


In an interview with Gomes, he reveals the role music plays in his films:

In fact, when Pilar was going to the cinema—and in the script, she went three times, in the film only two—it was intended that you would never see the screen but would hear a song. Maybe this is my emotional link with cinema, that I wanted to materialize it by not showing whatever Pilar is seeing, only portraying it as a song. For me as a viewer of cinema and a listener to music, I wanted to have the same response to the sequence as I would if I were hearing a great song, not being moved by the lyrics but by a more abstract feeling one has in response to music. It’s the melody, and something that works in your system in a very abstract way. Sometimes you don’t know why the hell you’re so moved. I’ve dreamed of making films that would evoke this kind of emotional response.