"Tabu" (Moviemail 07/09/12)

The spirit of saudade, that very Portuguese form of melancholic longing, permeates Tabu, a singular, rapturously photographed monochrome oddity from director Miguel Gomes that keeps rupturing, leaving the viewer to decide how its constituent parts mesh together. Take, for example, the apparently stand-alone prologue, in which an explorer trying to escape from the memory of his lost love in Africa ends up throwing himself to a crocodile: utterly batty as it is, the explorer’s experience appears to haunt all those characters subsequently seen flitting across the screen.

What follows is divided into two parts. “A Paradise Lost” unfolds over the last days of December 2010 in Lisbon, where Pilar (Teresa Madruga), a devout, politically active fiftysomething, becomes entwined in the lives of Aurora (Laura Soveral), a demanding older neighbour drifting into senility, and the latter’s loyal yet put-upon housemaid Santa (Isabel Cardoso). In some ways, this first half is Tabu’s most radical conceit: not even matinee crossovers like The Help and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel had this much time, patience and sympathy for women of a certain age sharing their stories and fears over tea and cake.

Eventually, Aurora will also begin to burble about crocodiles, mentioning that she has “blood on [her] hands”, and dropping the name Ventura. With the sudden introduction of a male narrator, telling us this woman “had a farm in Africa”, Tabu segues into a wordless second part, “Paradise Found”, in which we learn how the aforementioned Ventura, a dashing cad played by Orlando Bloom-alike Carloto Cotta, came to seduce the younger Aurora (Ana Moreira), a hotshot married adventuress.

This section, which aims for the glamorous textures of 1930s melodrama, is the weaker of the two, the joy in storytelling so evident in the first part tipping over into pastiche: the characters are somehow less vivid than their onscreen predecessors, asked to lipsynch to incongruous Ramones and Phil Spector tracks that offer up puns on the plot. The similarly silent-like, square-framed The Artist was (rather snootily) dismissed in certain quarters as no more than a novelty item; here, that criticism does more or less stick. It’s a gorgeously ephemeral film, at least: never less than beautiful to observe, a measured, quietly beguiling retreat from our world into nature, Portuguese history, and the lingering mysteries of the human heart.

Tabu opens in selected cinemas from today.