From Portugal with playfulness

By Nicholas Barber

A European, black-and-white period melodrama that doesn’t have any dialogue? A year ago, a description of "Tabu" would have read like a recipe for box-office poison, but after the world-beating triumph of "The Artist", Miguel Gomes’s experimental Portuguese film might just find an audience. Not that that audience won’t be perplexed from time to time. Opening with a droll prologue featuring an explorer, his wife’s ghost and a "sad and melancholic crocodile", "Tabu" settles down in present-day Lisbon, where a middle-aged good samaritan (Teresa Madruga) is coping with the eccentricities of her elderly neighbour, Aurora (Laura Soveral). Her efforts are touching, funny and a tiny bit boring, but just as you’re losing patience, Gomes whisks you back to colonial Africa in the 1960s, when Aurora (now played by Ana Moreira) was a big-game-hunting beauty. This is the film’s near-silent section: in lieu of dialogue, it has a voice-over from an old man, recalling the tragic affair he had with Aurora in his dashing youth. Gomes’s playful storytelling works like a charm, transforming what might have been a torrid tale of tropical lust into a dreamlike, uplifting study of loss, loneliness and memory. It’s not "The Artist", but it’s definitely artistic. ~ Nicholas Barber

Tabu opens in Britain Sept 7th