Wordiezett So much average

ShangLuda Admirable film.

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Red-125 Tabu (2012/I) is a Portuguese movie co-written and directed by Miguel Gomes. The film begins in modern-day Portugal, where an old woman named Aurora (Laura Soveral) is leading a quiet and sheltered life. We know there's some mystery about her earlier life, but we don't know what it is. Aurora becomes ill, and when she realizes that she won't recover, she shares a man's name with a neighbor, and asks the neighbor to find this man.The film then shifts to Africa about fifty years earlier, at a time when Aurora was a young woman. (The young Aurora is portrayed by the lovely Portuguese actor Ana Moreira.) Portugal is still the colonial power, but the anti-colonialist revolutions are beginning.What happens during this period is full of wild romance, with Aurora at its center. The man named by the dying Aurora is the link that brings the two plots together.Although this movie was completed in 2012, it has the look of earlier film. This is partly because it's shot in black and white, and partly because the director has chosen to remind us that great movies have been with us for many, many years.We saw Tabu on DVD, where it worked well. It's not the perfect film for everyone, but it's a good choice if you want something foreign and different.

PatonFassi Gomes's masterpiece, a controversial love story (a pregnant woman falls in love for a man who is not the father of her unborn child) in a colonial context is only a pretext to expose the desire for fiction. Is a film so amazing to watch, as it is difficult to describe and explain the pleasure it generates. The entire film is in black and white and in television format. Gomes presents a splendid poetry about the course of life. In its own way, very cinematic, develops excellent takes and camera movements to characterize the various characters in the surrounding environment. It's not all because the images created by Gomes are graceful and with a lyricism at the level of the masters of silent film which the movie talk / dialog.

georgep53 "Tabu" is a rather odd but beautiful little film that defies easy classification. The first part is a drama about three women in an apartment building in modern day Lisbon. Aurora started off life as a woman of privilege who later marries a well-to-do landowner. The years haven't been kind to her and she seems to be losing her grip on reality. Her daughter employs a woman, Santa, to look after her but otherwise has no contact. Santa hails from a former Portuguese colony and is trying to adapt to western culture. A third woman, Pilar is a concerned neighbor who demonstrates on behalf of social causes. Together the three women represent different ways of coping with Portugal's history. Aurora for whom the past was a kind of golden age; Santa who has chosen to remain in Portugal and adjust to her new world and Pilar who appears to embrace activist political causes perhaps as a way of atoning the past.The second part is a steamy melodrama that unfolds as a memory sequence involving a young and beautiful Aurora who's stuck in a dull marriage to a rich man in colonial Africa. Later she meets a man and begins a passionate relationship which could threaten both of their futures. There's also a crocodile who first appears in a prologue when it consumes a despondent man whose love has passed away. A crocodile appears again as a gift to Aurora from her husband. That crocodile would haunt Aurora in her later years as if it were an avenger seeking the souls of those who've been unwilling or unable to accept life's lack of concern for our emotional attachments. This idea of the past as perhaps best forgotten is heightened by the callous disregard the younger generation displays for the older. "Tabu" is not for everyone. Those who gravitate toward plot-driven story lines will be frustrated but if you enjoy a thoughtful, introspective character drama this is a treat.

Karl Ericsson I always loved voice-overs in films. Almost as much as I hated all attempts of realism in films.So called "reality" is the worst kind of delusion. It makes us feel that we have time when in truth there is not time. It binds us to the moment and makes us blind to what it means. A story can reveal tragedy but when you are in the midst of it, in the "reality" of it, you only see that "reality" which makes everything trivial.That's the magic of the voice-over. You see everything happening as in "reality" but the voice-over pulls you back and the reveals the greater truth, the story.In this film, this is cleverly utilized. The story is banal for sure but the voice-over reveals that what was conceived as "real" was only a dream. This film stays in the voice-over and shows how most of our talk is just blabber and not necessary to understand what is going on. In the second part of the film, which is the part in which the voice-over takes over, there is no dialogue to be heard and I, as the viewer, could not be more happy about it. The paradise, which is the title of this second half of the film, is, to me, the blessing of not having to hear the blabber. All other sounds are revealed and the director makes a point out of it. These sounds do not disrupt the magic. Only the blabber would do that and bring forth the trivial.