★★★★☆ The power of the lens to deconstruct colonial history is a primary concern in Miguel Gomes' third feature, Tabu (2012). Partitioned by two distinctive halves, it's a mesmeric example of how to unravel filmic modes without clogging up the narrative. The first section is set in modern day Lisbon and follows pious elderly woman Pilar (Teresa Madruga) and her concerns about neighbour Aurora (Laura Soveral), who's convinced that her African maid (Isabel Cardoso) is using voodoo against her. Pilar tracks down Ventura, a man from Aurora's past whom she once married at the foot of Africa's Mount Tabu, over 50 years prior.
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- 1/14/2013
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
A full day after watching Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, the film’s many moving parts have not quite yet fallen back into place during reflection. This is by no means a criticism of the film, just a statement about the ways in which this lyrical ode to cinema, colonialism, dreams, love, crocodiles, and mental illness deftly explores and incorporates a variety of styles, themes, and ideas together into a beautifully cohesive and coherent, if unlikely, whole. I’m not saying Tabu is greater than the sum of its parts, for in many ways Tabu is precisely about the ruptures that separate its various stylistic and narrative components, but rather that Tabu is a strange and hypnotizing moving image poem with no comprehensive or unifying point of comparison. Tabu is a film made through a truly unique and inspired vision and voice. Tabu opens with a wry fairy tale depicting journey of an explorer traversing colonial...
- 12/21/2012
- by Landon Palmer
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
Today we have a new teaser poster for Tabu movie, the Jury Prize winner at this years Berlin Film Festival.
Acclaimed director Miguel Gomes (“Our Beloved Month of August”) returns with a sumptuous, eccentric two-part tale centered on Aurora, shown first as an impulsive, cantankerous elderly woman in present-day Lisbon.
When Aurora is hospitalized, she sends her neighbor, Pilar, to pass word of her grave condition to Gian Luca, a man of which no one has ever heard her speak. Pilar’s quest to fulfill her friend’s wish transports us to Africa fifty years earlier, before the start of the Portuguese Colonial War. We see Aurora again, this time as the gorgeous, smoldering wife of a wealthy young farmer, involved in a forbidden love affair with Gian Luca, her husband’s best friend. Their moving, poetic tale is conveyed through the older Gian Luca’s suave voiceover, combined with the lush,...
Acclaimed director Miguel Gomes (“Our Beloved Month of August”) returns with a sumptuous, eccentric two-part tale centered on Aurora, shown first as an impulsive, cantankerous elderly woman in present-day Lisbon.
When Aurora is hospitalized, she sends her neighbor, Pilar, to pass word of her grave condition to Gian Luca, a man of which no one has ever heard her speak. Pilar’s quest to fulfill her friend’s wish transports us to Africa fifty years earlier, before the start of the Portuguese Colonial War. We see Aurora again, this time as the gorgeous, smoldering wife of a wealthy young farmer, involved in a forbidden love affair with Gian Luca, her husband’s best friend. Their moving, poetic tale is conveyed through the older Gian Luca’s suave voiceover, combined with the lush,...
- 9/20/2012
- by Allan Ford
- Filmofilia
As I mentioned in the preface to the first part of my Wavelengths preview (the one focusing on the short films), there are significant changes afoot in 2012. Until last year, the festival had a section known as Visions, which was the primary home for formally challenging cinema that nevertheless conformed to the basic tenets of arthouse and/or “festival” cinema (actors, scripting, 70+minute running time, and, once upon a time, 35mm presentation). This year, Wavelengths is both its former self, and it also contains the sort of work that Visions most likely would have housed. While in some respects this can seem to result in a kind of split personality for the section, it also means that Wavelengths, which has often been described as a sort of “festival within the festival,” has moved front and center. Films that would’ve occupied single slots in the older avant-Wavelengths model, like the...
- 9/12/2012
- MUBI
An elegant, Africa-set melodrama isn't just for cinephiles
The latest feature from Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes might look like a forbidding cinemathèque-type item. Actually, it's a gem: gentle, eccentric, possessed of a distinctive sort of innocence – and also charming and funny. Gomes has here something of Manoel de Oliveira's slightly stately deportment, and this is the kind of modern-day mystery of Lisbon that would might have interested the late Raúl Ruiz. There is plenty of deadpan wit and fun, and Gomes has Kaurismäki's love of musical interludes, bringing on a guitar band and just letting them play.
There are two parts, or three if you count the enigmatic prologue introducing us to a certain mysterious crocodile, which may or may not turn out to be the emblem or reincarnation of anguished love. In modern-day Lisbon, a devout middle-aged Catholic woman Pilar (Teresa Madruga) is concerned about her elderly neighbour,...
The latest feature from Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes might look like a forbidding cinemathèque-type item. Actually, it's a gem: gentle, eccentric, possessed of a distinctive sort of innocence – and also charming and funny. Gomes has here something of Manoel de Oliveira's slightly stately deportment, and this is the kind of modern-day mystery of Lisbon that would might have interested the late Raúl Ruiz. There is plenty of deadpan wit and fun, and Gomes has Kaurismäki's love of musical interludes, bringing on a guitar band and just letting them play.
There are two parts, or three if you count the enigmatic prologue introducing us to a certain mysterious crocodile, which may or may not turn out to be the emblem or reincarnation of anguished love. In modern-day Lisbon, a devout middle-aged Catholic woman Pilar (Teresa Madruga) is concerned about her elderly neighbour,...
- 9/6/2012
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
"Tabu" (dir. Miguel Gomes, 2012) Gomes' Berlin Film Festival sensation is an evocative, lyrical two-chapter love story separated by decades and continents that transcends what initially seems to be nothing more than an experiment in style over substance. Beginning in modern day-ish Lisbon, we are introduced to Aurora, an old woman mentally and physical deteriorating, in an equally frightening and hilarious performance by Laura Soveral. On her death bed, Aurora mentions a lover's name which is written off by two companions (her maid and an empathetic neighbour) as nonsense but, upon discovery of this man's actual existence and his arrival to the hospital, the film transports into a dreamy, fairytale-like flashback to the pair's African-set romance that audaciously couples the existing black and white, 4:3 and 16mm photography with a world where there's little-to-no spoken dialogue and narrated by Gian Luca (Carlotta Cotta with v.o. by Gomes...
- 8/20/2012
- by Simon Dang
- The Playlist
As festival-goers everywhere race to publish their various ‘Best of the Fest’ lists and reviews, readers will do doubt notice a trend beginning to emerge as the majority of these articles make considerable room for Miguel Gomes’ Portuguese epic, Tabu. Mine, perhaps controversially, most definitely will not.
Spread over two parts, the first, “Paradise Lost”, follows the lives of three women over the course of several months: elderly gambling addict Aurora (Laura Soveral), no-nonsense housekeeper Santa (Isabel Cardoso), and lonely landlord Pilar (Teresa Madruga), who is stood up by a deceitful prospective tenant. When Aurora takes ill and requests the presence of a previously private acquaintance, the women track down Gian Luca Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo) and drive him to the hospital at which the elderly woman is currently admitted. Along the way, he regales his escorts with the story of his and Portuguese heiress Aurora’s (played in flashback by Ana Moreira) first meeting,...
Spread over two parts, the first, “Paradise Lost”, follows the lives of three women over the course of several months: elderly gambling addict Aurora (Laura Soveral), no-nonsense housekeeper Santa (Isabel Cardoso), and lonely landlord Pilar (Teresa Madruga), who is stood up by a deceitful prospective tenant. When Aurora takes ill and requests the presence of a previously private acquaintance, the women track down Gian Luca Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo) and drive him to the hospital at which the elderly woman is currently admitted. Along the way, he regales his escorts with the story of his and Portuguese heiress Aurora’s (played in flashback by Ana Moreira) first meeting,...
- 7/4/2012
- by Steven Neish
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
In 2009, the best film in Competition at the Berlinale was Maren Ade's Everyone Else (Fwiw, it came away with 1.5 Silver Bears, the 1 for Best Actress Birgit Minichmayr, the .5 for tying with Adrián Biniez's Gigante for the Jury Grand Prix; the Golden Bear that year went to Claudia Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow). Three years on (!), the trio that made Everyone Else worth talking up to this day (see, for example, Kevin B Lee's new video essay on a key scene at Fandor; see, too, Mike D'Angelo on the same scene a year ago at the Av Club) is back in Competition, albeit in three different films. Lars Eidinger has drawn the shortest straw, taking on the lead in Hans-Christian Schmid's rather dismal Home for the Weekend. Minichmayr's fared better opposite Jürgen Vogel in Matthias Glasner's new film, though I seriously doubt many of us will...
- 2/18/2012
- MUBI
Nina Hoss in Christian Petzold's Barbara
"An additional ten world premieres will be screening in the Competition program of the Berlinale 2012," the festival's announced today:
Aujourd'hui
France/Senegal
By Alain Gomis (L'Afrance, Andalucia)
With Saül Williams, Aïssa Maïga, Djolof M'bengue
"What goes on inside the head of a man who knows he has only 24 hours to live?" begins a report from the Afp. "Franco-Senegalese director Alain Gomis takes viewers through this final day."
Barbara
Germany
By Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow, Dreileben)
With Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld
The synopsis from The Match Factory: "East Germany. Barbara has requested a departure permit. It is the summer of 1978. She is a physician and is transferred, for disciplinary reasons, to a small hospital far away from everything in a provincial backwater. Her lover, a foreign trade employee at Mannesmann that she met on a spring night in East Berlin, is working on her escape.
"An additional ten world premieres will be screening in the Competition program of the Berlinale 2012," the festival's announced today:
Aujourd'hui
France/Senegal
By Alain Gomis (L'Afrance, Andalucia)
With Saül Williams, Aïssa Maïga, Djolof M'bengue
"What goes on inside the head of a man who knows he has only 24 hours to live?" begins a report from the Afp. "Franco-Senegalese director Alain Gomis takes viewers through this final day."
Barbara
Germany
By Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow, Dreileben)
With Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld
The synopsis from The Match Factory: "East Germany. Barbara has requested a departure permit. It is the summer of 1978. She is a physician and is transferred, for disciplinary reasons, to a small hospital far away from everything in a provincial backwater. Her lover, a foreign trade employee at Mannesmann that she met on a spring night in East Berlin, is working on her escape.
- 1/9/2012
- MUBI
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