[TABU
screens Thursday June 13th at 7:30 pm and Saturday June 15th at 9:20 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]
Review
by Bob Ignizio
There is a strong romantic streak
melded with a sense of the fantastic as part of the everyday that
runs through Miguel Gomes' TABU. The film is then covered in
a deliberate sheen of artifice and tempered with enough warm humanism
to ensure it never feels too stuffy or pretentious. It begins with a
prologue set at some unspecified time in the past in which a
Portuguese explorer braves the perils of “darkest” Africa. He has
ostensibly been sent there as an agent of Church and State. In
reality, the explorer's true motivation is grief over a lost love,
and rather than carry out his official mission he instead commits
suicide by crocodile. His act becomes part of the local legends and
lore, with many claiming to see a beautiful woman by the river
accompanied by a crocodile.
The film then flashes forward to the
present day just after Christmas where we meet the elderly gambling
addict Aurora (Laura Soveral), her black caretaker Santa (Isabel
Muñoz Cardoso), and Pilar (Teresa Madruga), a well intentioned
busy-body neighbor who worries that Aurora needs more help than Santa
can provide. Pilar's feelings turn out to be warranted when Aurora
suddenly falls ill as the New Year dawns. Aurora isn't given long to
live, and she asks Pilar to find a man named Ventura (Henrique
Espírito) and bring him to her side. This eventually leads to a
flashback to Aurora's younger days (where she is played by Ana
Moreira), in which we see her and the young Ventura (Carloto Cotta)
engage in a forbidden love affair, and the ramifications thereof.
The entire film is shot in gorgeous
black and white, with the scenes set in the past done silent with
narration, although there is no attempt, as in THE ARTIST,
to faithfully replicate silent film techniques. The feeling one gets
while watching TABU
is of hearing a fairy tale or fable for adults. Like all fairy tales,
this one is rife with symbolism and iconic figures, with the most
obvious and persistent being the crocodile who acts as some sort of
avatar of tragic romances. Some critics, such as A.O. Scott, have
taken the film to task for not taking some kind of stance against the
colonialism it depicts in its flashback sequences. While Scott's
critique is not without merit, the film does at least touch on these
issues, albeit in a subtle and poetic way in keeping with the overall
tone. Had the film
taken a more overtly political approach it would be very different.
Not necessarily bad, but certainly lacking the magic TABU
possesses in the form it presently exists. 3 1/2 out of 4 stars.
As published on Examiner.com
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