Critics reviews

Gomes welds two major stylistic and directorial strands he has manifested in his previous works into an unified directorial vision: the magical realism of his so-called musical comedies such as A Cara que Mereces (The Face You Deserve, 2004) and the docu-fiction of Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto (Our Beloved Month of August, 2008).

Like Scheherazade, [Gomes] spins his yarns as a distraction for his safety, but one could also read Arabian Nights as a testament to the capability of stories and even the airing of grievances to sidetrack people from taking necessary action. The final installment of the trilogy shows Gomes working his way back to the real world after disappearing from it for hours, only to find that he can be just as experimental and fanciful as he was in the trilogy's most abstract moments.

Like the first volume, the film requires an investment on the part of the audience. But the cinematic language in which Gomes is working is immersive rather than strictly narrative. And as such, the occasional lapse of concentration hardly matters.

This is some achievement: to have made each story completely different from the next and from the story that precedes it... Arabian Nights seems to say that the effects of policy – legislation meant to liberate Portugal of its debts – can look 1,001 different ways depending on the lens, depending through whose life we see economic reforms refracted. The triptych's wending unpredictability appears to contest the kinds of forecasts used to justify punitive austerity measures.

Coscripted with Mariana Ricardo and Telmo Churro, the films deftly blend political satire, escapist fable, and reporting on the unemployed... The films are enchanting for their irony, their humanity, and their reflexiveness.

A three-part, six-hour, funny, sad, ambitious, and frequently bewildering epic... Gradually it becomes clear that Gomes isn't out to make a grand political statement, but rather to create a sweeping mosaic that reflects the confusion and vitality of life at the moment of the work's creation. In this regard, ARABIAN NIGHTS suggests a cinematic analogue to the Clash's triple album Sandinista! (1980), replete with in-jokes, sloganeering, and passages of failed experimentation.

Viewed through the haze of Gomes's film, the book emerges as a sumptuous, hyper version of the filmmaker's previous works—above all, in the way that it offers lessons in stories that require the presence of another story: a work as an anthology. Gomes has always enjoyed combining two separate elements in a single film, and in Arabian Nights this technique is cosmically expanded. Each new story stylistically corrects or contradicts the story preceding it.

Arabian Nights might be the clearest expression of Jean-Luc Godard's ‘every film is a documentary' adage since the French master's own work in the late 1970s and 80s. I find it most satisfying to view Gomes' film-thing as an almost ridiculously thorough nonfiction self-portrait of cinematic structures and ideas, laid bare in a specific place at a particularly sensitive moment in that place's political history.

It will take several more viewings to begin to come to terms with Gomes' sprawling, six-hour, three-part epic of storytelling, documentary, political fable and autoportrait. And those four genres just scratch the surface of the fantastical and fantastically rich complication of visual and sound fantasias that Gomes puts into play... This deliriously overstuffed text extends what we imagine cinema can encompass, and dissolves boundaries that prevent us from thinking radically about our world.

Gomes knows how to wrap an audience around his little finger—see Tabu for reference—but conscientiously keeps himself from slipping into a rhythm here, switching up time signatures in unexpected ways. These films are the work of a free man, and the exhilaration is infectious.

Miguel Gomes's Arabian Nights (which was shown in Bangkok last month) is actually a three-part film, each running for two hours, a hard-hitting and yet fabulous fact-fiction hybrid that looks at the impact of Portugal's economic woes. Instead of submitting the whole six-hour film, the Portuguese director chose the second part, the most eccentric and perhaps most heartfelt of the three.

The result is a thing of structural complexity, at times seemingly postmodern long before the modern even existed. One Thousand and One Nights is a dense, dizzying knot of nested stories that, taken as a whole, is as much an exploration of storytelling as it is a vast catalogue of human nature.