art-house

Tabu Film Difficulty Ranking: 4

Are you up for seeing one of the most interesting and unique films of the 21st century? Here’s Tabu. It will introduce you to life in Lisbon and life in the old Portuguese colonies of Africa. It will also get you trying to figure out the film’s meaning whilst you are lulled by the gorgeous black and white cinematography. The best thing to do is to sit back, relax, and let Miguel Gomes tell you this story.

Why Watch Tabu?

• It’s one of the greatest Portuguese films of the 21st Century
• For a completely different take on colonisation to Embrace of the Serpent
• To hear an awesome soundtrack (and a goofy band picture shoot)
• Learn about saudade: a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return

The Breakdown

A Portuguese explorer wanders the African wilderness looking for something. He stares into the abyss whilst Africans carry his belongings past him. From the soothing voice of the narrator and the tingling piano we learn that the explorer is searching for an end. Not the end of the world, but an end to his life after his wife died back in Portugal. To end his life, he throws himself into a swamp as prey for the crocodiles. Ever since that moment, locals see apparitions of a woman sitting beside a sad looking crocodile.

Tabu is broken into two parts, following the introduction. The first part, titled ‘A Lost Paradise’ follows a middle aged activist called Pilar. She lives alone in an apartment in Lisbon. The only thing she looked forward to was a visit from a young Polish girl, however, at the airport the girl rejects her whilst posing as someone else. Her only friends are her old neighbour Aurora and Aurora’s assistant, Santa. Pilar is captured perfectly in one shot of her looking out across Lisbon from her balcony at night. Because of the darkness, she merges into the darkness and the city she looks at, connecting her loneliness and melancholy to the city she lives in. Both are full of melancholy and looking for definition.

The second part is titled ‘Paradise’ and focuses on Aurora’s years in Africa. ‘Paradise’ is filmed without dialogue. Instead the director, Gomes, opts for a narrator. Because of this, the whole section becomes a nostalgic ode to the past. It shows saudade (definition in the bullet points above) for the colonial times, a time when Aurora was free to define her life, in contrast to Pilar’s vague life in Lisbon. Whilst Tabu celebrates the freedom of living in a colony, it does not condone colonialism. Instead it offers a critique of the state of contemporary Portuguese society, that it still looks back to an imperial past for self definition.

Conclusion

Tabu is the perfect representation of saudade in film. It offers a nostalgic look at Portuguese colonialism whilst critiquing it. Watch this gem alongside the beautiful Colombian Embrace of the Serpent for an exploration of European colonisation.

(For the more advanced film viewer, I’d also recommend pairing either Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution or the 7.5 hour Melancholia by Filipino Lav Diaz with the above)