If you didn’t know that Portuguese writer-director Miguel Gomes wrote film criticism before he started making movies, you’d probably figure it out within the first few minutes of his 2012 drama Tabu, which the Chicago Cinema Society screens this Sunday and Monday at the Patio Theater. The title is a direct reference to F.W. Murnau’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), and the movie opens with a ten-minute prologue that invokes the earlier work. Murnau’s film—an innovative mix of ethnographic documentary and expressionist melodrama—was made during the transitional period between silent and sound filmmaking, and Gomes approximates the soundtracks of that era. The prologue contains neither dialogue nor direct sound, but there are some post-sync sound effects and a musical score that’s tied to the on-screen action.
Though light on plot, “Paradise Lost” casts a powerful spell. In contrast to the prologue, which Gomes shot on 16-millimeter, this portion is shot on luminous 35-millimeter (though still in black-and-white) and features a dense soundtrack with direct-sound dialogue. Cinematographer Rui Poças achieves some captivating, expressionist-style chiaroscuro effects and shoots many of the scenes in balletic dolly shots that create a feeling of narrative momentum even if little is happening. Like the African savannah of the prologue, Lisbon seems to be haunted, but by history rather than the supernatural. At one point Pilar tours a cave that’s legendary for having once been a hideout for Roman and Moorish imperialists; she also spends an evening researching genocide in Africa for an activist committee to which she belongs. Aurora’s African servant improbably spends her free time immersed in a translation of Robinson Crusoe in order to teach herself Portuguese. And Aurora frequently confuses her dreams of the past with contemporary reality.
Murnau’s influence is most evident during these passages. In the earlier Tabu the lovers also flee a hostile environment, seeking refuge in a nearby island governed by Western colonials. They are exploited by white businessmen and ultimately found out by one of their tribesmen, who arrives to reclaim the girl. Gomes inverts the story by having his white lovers escape from colonial civilization into a more primitive environment, but he retains Murnau’s dark romanticism.
Directed by Miguel Gomes
