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Critics reviews

TABU

Miguel Gomes Portugal, 2012
The strength of Tabu lies in how powerfully sex is captured, offering aural and visual textures that inspire sensorial memories. The black and white imagery of beautiful people making love behind layers of mosquito nets is a beautiful vision. The sex looks good, feels good, but it's still just sex. But the nostalgia for this moment of time is unreal, rooted in a nostalgia for a broken system and a broken time.
July 16, 2015
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Despite the many reviews that describe it as "lush", this extravagance is almost entirely an illusion, a tribute to Gomes' ingenuity more than his budget. The director and his collaborators... have testified to the hard fact that, when they arrived on location in Africa, the budget evaporated – leaving the "central committee" listed in the credits with the task of devising a new, radically reworked script day by day.
February 6, 2014
Without denying the devastating impact of Portuguese colonialism, Gomes acknowledges that it fed the colonials' desire to experience life as the stuff of myth. In this regard, colonialism had much in common with cinema, enabling people to remake the world according to their own fantasies. Those fantasies may have died out, but Tabu unsettlingly suggests that they continue to haunt the Portuguese, who have yet to find a comparable dream to take their place in the imagination.
April 3, 2013
Gomes tenderly captures the moments of irrepressible passion between the protagonists, as a short-lived fire that consumed everything around it. Aurora and Ventura lived their last decades alone, in the same city of Lisbon, but never saw each other again. Tabu's intricate strategy articulates the mechanism of loss and memory: what you had when you were young cannot be retrieved, but it will haunt you forever.
March 17, 2013
...The filmmaking is so strong that every shot invites repeat visits. His innovation is not some romantic trip back in time—which is, of course, the supreme invitation of Western cinema—but rather, the hypothesis that such a trip is impossible without prolonging an illicit affair.
February 1, 2013
GreenCine
The film is as beautiful as it is polemical: Gomes' exceedingly clever structure makes it impossible to separate politics and aesthetics. The point is that existence in any historical moment doesn't allow the luxury of opting out, even by choosing not to participate in certain acts.
December 27, 2012
If you have the patience to watch this film develop and unfold, like some bizarre night-blooming orchid, what you'll see is not just the last movie released in 2012, but possibly the most original of them all.
December 27, 2012
It's a film in a rare genre: its plot is so adroitly and sensitively imagined and realized that a mere telling of the things that take place would suffice to reveal the depth of the director's imaginative discernment—his ample and nuanced vision of the extraordinary elements and implications of ordinary lives. But it's also realized with a casually audacious sense of cinematic form even as it ignores conventional wisdom regarding cinematic politics.
December 27, 2012
Truly a time-machine, "Tabu" does feel like something new (unlike say, last year's big winner, "The Artist"). Even, or rather, especially on repeated viewings. Gomes's movie is so ingenuous, well-executed, and filled with unexpected cinematic pleasures that it's restorative—a movie to reconfirm your faith in the motion picture medium.
December 26, 2012
Tabu is one of those truly unique movies you can get tongue-tied just trying to describe: a tragic pop pastiche? A lyrical Old Hollywood melodrama projected on a bedsheet? A celluloid curio à la Barnum's Fiji mermaid? At such times, it's better to stick with a simple "wonderful."
December 26, 2012
Churlish though it sounds, you'll want to arrive for this b&w Portuguese drama about 45 minutes late. Unconventional, yes, but in so doing, you will spare yourself the film's banal, wholly uninvolving setup, one that even Tabu's admirers—of whom there are a great many—seem to be selectively forgetting.
December 26, 2012
On a formal level this is about as laudable an effort as I could expect for a film whose neo-colonialist romantic perspective I normally reject as a matter of principle. On one level, it's more of the same swooning white material that illustrates how non-Africans can make great films in Africa, but not about Africa. But yeah, it's pretty beautiful.
December 15, 2012