Notizie

Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour takes its title from an established travel itinerary known as the Asian Grand Tour, a popular option with Westerners seeking a broad but surface-level introduction to the continent in the early 20th century. Proceeding from Mandalay to Rangoon (present-day Yangon) to Singapore, and then on through Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, and Osaka, before ending in Shanghai, the tour was ideally designed to satisfy the era’s popular taste for Eastern exoticism in an efficient, tourist-friendly package.

It’s easy to see the appeal for Gomes, a director for whom boundaries of space and time have always been ripe for cinematic manipulation. Grand Tour retraces the steps of the journey with the imagination and playfulness of his best work, indulging its globetrotting impulses while casting a satirical eye on its uncomfortable basis in colonial conquest.

Gomes’s film actually takes its titular tour twice, utilizing a diptych...

The twelfth entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Mubi will be showing João Pedro Rodrigues's To Die Like a Man (2009) March 4 - April 2 and Two Drifters (2005) March 5 - April 3, 2016 in the United States.The concept that unifies the work of Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues (signed alone or in collaboration with João Rui Guerra da Mata) is that of shifting: a shifting of gender (in any direction from male to female, via all hybrid possibilities in-between), and of genre (romantic melodrama crossed with the fantastique, or documentary sliding over into fiction as in The Last Time I Saw Macao, 2012), even of species (confusion of human and animal realms in O Fantasma, 2000). Most gripping and beguiling of all is the director’s fondness for unexpectedly supernatural themes—all the better to blur the distinction between mortality and immortality, a key theme...

The ghosts did not take long to present themselves. Oliveira's seventh feature, Visita ou Memórias e Confissões, conveys a bevy of autobiographical musings on his family house and himself. Filmed in 1981 when he was 73, yet shelved voluntarily until after his death, Memories and Confessions has since become a kind of talisman for the director, an n+1 variable where the n is his 31-item back catalogue cut short last year. The first character introduced in the movie is a magnolia that blooms twice a year—first in "a rapid blossoming," then in the shape of "a rare star of maturity." Conveniently, the film's structure comprises just what the original title enumerates: a visit, some memories, a handful of confessions. The visitors in question are a man and a woman whom we do not get to see but whose voices we keep hearing off-screen. As they drop in at an empty house...

Spanning more than six hours, spread across three films, "Tabu" director Miguel Gomes' "Arabian Nights" will test the stamina (and scheduling) of moviegoers and press at Cannes. His latest film will unspool as part of the Cannes Directors' Fortnight, and today we get a three-minute glimpse of the epic movie he's preparing to unveil. Crista Alfaiate, Adriano Luz, Américo Silva, Carloto Cotta, Crista Alfaiate, Chico Chapas, Luísa Cruz, Gonçalo Waddington, Joana de Verona, Teresa Madruga, and Jing Jing Guo are among the cast in the film which uses the classic fables to paint a portrait of contemporary Portugal, with stories that look to span a variety of social, political, and economic settings. Here's the official synopsis for all three volumes: Volume 1, The Restless One In which Scheherazade tells of the restlessness that befell the country: “It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that in a sad country among all countries,...

Toying with narrative form seems to be director Miguel Gomes’s forte. Our Beloved Month Of August turned the documentation of a musically inclined rural village into a humorous deconstruction the filmmaking process, never revealing what might or might not be real. With his latest, Tabu (double 2012 Berlin Film Festival winner: Alfred Bauer Award and a Fipresci award), the boundaries of reality are never breached, but the gear shifting narrative is no less inventive and quite a bit more emotionally engaging than his last go round. This time he takes us into the life of a Lisbon dwelling gambling addict retiree who’s implicit previous life in the African foot hills regarding Mount Tabu holds memories of her peak of passion and regret, but this tail, at first caustically withholding and later spryly romantic, is full of rich misdirection that deftly plays with the ideas of loyalty and repression with surprising verve.

★★★★☆ 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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by Vadim Rizov

Miguel Gomes' third feature Tabu is as different from his first two (as yet, he has no recurring stylistic tics) as it is from any other film this year. What it shares with 2004's severely patience-testing The Face You Deserve (which prompted one interviewer to ask, verbatim, "what the fuck") and 2008's delightful Our Beloved Month of August is severe structural separation. The Face You Deserve morphs into a different movie after 20 minutes, while August playfully/evasively morphs from a quasi-documentary about itself to an overtly staged narrative halfway through.

The division in Tabu is less porous and more pointed. First, a prologue (narrated by Gomes) about a colonial expedition instigated "by order of the king and Bible," headed by a pith-hatted explorer. "Taciturn and melancholy, the sad figure wanders," Gomes intones in deadpan over images of the stone-faced explorer and his native bearers, a scene...

Part realism and part fantasy, half 35mm and half 16mm, part post-colonial and part colonial, half a swooning love story and half a clear-eyed political assessment, Miguel Gomes’s Tabu functions, as he puts it in this interview, within a structure of oppositions. Simultaneously a rebuke – and vindication – of the concept that “the personal is the political,” Tabu is a carefully constructed film in two halves, each of which comments upon the absences articulated in the other. We start in present-day Portugal, with Pilar (Teresa Madruga), a middle-aged woman who works for an unidentified lefty non-profit. Pilar is of …...

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...

Tabu

Directed by Miguel Gomes

Written by Miguel Gomes

Portugal, 2012

With his third feature, Portuguese critic-turned-auteur Miguel Gomes has proven himself to be a director in complete control of his craft. Tabu is a film of artistic cool – breaking classic genre conventions in the most crafty and affectionate way by consistently subverting the narrative in a beautiful dreamlike style. The film is divided into two parts: The first section is set in modern day Lisbon and titled Paradise Lost. It follows Aurora, an elderly cranky woman who spends her last days suffering from paranoia and the emotional burden of a troubled past. The second section, titled Paradise, is set in Mozambique in the 1960s, and tells the story of her uncontrollable and obsessive relationship with a man named Venturo, deep in the jungles of Africa. These two chapters are preceded by an enigmatic prologue, which turns out to be a...

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,...

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...

Anna Karenina (12A)

(Joe Wright, 2012, UK/Fra) Keira Knightley, Kelly Macdonald, Jude Law, 130 mins

Bringing period drama up-to-date, Wright's radical reinterpretation of Tolstoy's tragedy stages the action almost entirely in a theatre – backstage areas, red curtains and all. It's a smart framing device for the Imperial Russia on display, even if the stylisation puts emotion at a slight remove, not helped by the love-or-loathe leads. But it's still a sight to behold, with rich colours, doll's-house sets and costumes to die for (spoiler alert!).

Dredd (18)

(Pete Travis, 2012, UK) Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, Lena Headey, Rakie Ayola. 95 mins

Aiming to please old 2000Ad fans rather than convert new ones, this post-apocalyptic sci-fi has all the violent justice and jutting-chin action you'd want, with some visual flourishes to make up for a straightahead plot.

Lawless (18)

(John Hillcoat, 2012, Us) Tom Hardy, Shia Labeouf, Guy Pearce. 116 mins

Cops, gangsters and a family of moonshine...

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,...

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,...

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...

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.