Contemporary homages to the silent age are tuppence are dozen, but none are quite as eccentric as Miguel Gomes’s Tabu. One of last year’s oddball gems, it joins The Artist and Hugo in sending a love letter to cinema’s formative geniuses and yet sets its swooningly romantic silent section in a Portuguese colony of Africa in the turbulent early 1960s. Its starcrossed protagonists have a scene of frank lovemaking, and one of the silent stars is a baby crocodile.
Tabu’s two segments – which take the names of Paradise Lost and Paradise – are the story’s effect and cause. The first is set in wintry present-day Lisbon, where a lonely do-gooding Catholic spinster Pilar (Teresa Madruga) offers neighbourly support to chaotic, dysfunctional old bat Aurora (Laura Soveral), who delusory behaviour – and estrangement from her daughter – is explained the illicit love affair we see played out in the lush sun-baked second half, set in Africa half a century earlier. Here Aurora (now played by Laura Soveral) blossoms anew like a sad-eyed siren of early cinema). The chasm between past and present is underpinned by Gomes’s audacious decision to bleed the colonial scenes of speech, other than the narrative drone of Aurora’s now ancient lover Ventura (Espírito Santo in old age, Carloto Cotta in youth). It's the boldest formal trope of a director with a poet's visual eye to match.
Rather than submit his quirky masterpiece to vulgar exegesis by interview or, even worse, director’s commentary, Gomes includes two short films by way of extras. They act as uncompromising companion pieces to the Tabu’s opening sequence, which turns out to be an excerpt from a fictional film watched by Pilar in her fruitless quest for romance. In it a lone 19th-century explorer whose wife has died feeds himself sacrificially to a hungry crococile, a reptile which thus comes to symbolise love later in the film. For further notes on Tabu look no further than Graham Fuller’s scholarly unpacking of its cinematic antecedents, as reviewed on theartsdesk upon its theatrical release.
