DARK NIGHTS IN THE REAL WORLD OF FANTASY
Miguel Gomes combines the factual and the fantastic in his six-hour snapshot of Portugal’s economic crisis
Many current film-makers make hybrid films or so-called documentary fictions, but Portuguese director Miguel Gomes may be the most baroque in dreaming up new ways to combine the factual and the fantastic. One attribute of his cinema is its denial of categories. Another is the degree of selfreflexivity: to watch his films to think about how they were made.
Our Beloved Month of August (2008), the first of Gomes’ four features to have a theatrical run in the United States, is an ostensible music documentary set in an isolated region of Portugal that turns into a film about its own making. Tabu (2012), his most seemingly conventional work, is a chronologically inverted romance, partly set in colonial Africa, with a narrative structure designed to have the viewer read the past through the prism of the future.
Gomes’ latest effort, provocatively called Arabian Nights, is his most ambitious — a suite of three feature-length volumes, each about two hours long, mixing deadpan magic realism with oblique social reportage. Taken as a whole, they constitute an eccentric widescreen snapshot of Portugal enduring its ongoing economic crisis.
Asked if he saw Arabian Nights as one film or three, Gomes, 43, deflected the question with characteristic humour: “It’s a miracle, but I see it both ways.”
The first volume, subtitled The Restless One, focuses largely on questions of work — including the film-maker’s own. After shooting a scene concerning a shuttered Lisbon shipyard, Gomes flees his own production followed by his crew. “I’m stupid, and abstraction gives me vertigo,” he whines, posing the question: How does one make an entertaining movie from a miserable reality of layoffs, strikes, enforced austerity and economic shrinkage? Enter Scheherazade (played by Crista Alfaiate). The gracious and beautiful narrator of the literary Arabian
Nights functions as Gomes’ movie muse: She enables a series of interlocking tales that, among other things, concern bewitched creditors, talking animals, an exploding whale and a mass New Year’s Day swim in the Atlantic meant to hearten the unemployed who, largely played by themselves, are referred to as the “Magnificents” (a title evoking the grandees of medieval Venice).
“The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically,” Jean-Luc Godard once said. Gomes’ model for making Arabian Nights appears to have been a newspaper. From the summer of 2013 to that of 2014, he operated a newsroom that he described as “a little factory for making stories”. (It was during that time that Portugal’s beleaguered government sought to avoid a second international bailout through additional spending cuts, mainly in the public sector, then wound up spending nearly €4 billion to prop up the nation’s largest bank.)
Three professional journalists (two of whom were otherwise unemployed) were assigned to travel throughout Portugal, reporting back with material to be dramatised, after a fashion, by actors Gomes had on call. The wealth of material necessitated the three-part structure. In an interview, Gomes said he knew how he wanted to make
Arabian Nights (it was financed by the Portuguese Institute of Cinema with additional money from France, Germany and Switzerland) before he had a clear idea of what it would be about. The first story filmed was inspired by a lawsuit brought against a rooster for crowing in the middle of the night. During production, it was discovered that the same small town had another sensational case — a jilted man had turned arsonist — which Gomes re-enacted, across gender lines, with a cast of local children.
Fond of referring to the literary Arabian Nights as “rock ’n’ roll fiction”, Gomes has conjured something appropriately freewheeling in its shifting tone and perverse mashups. One story in
Volume 2 — The Desolate One was inspired by the news report of a magistrate reduced to tears. Gomes introduces the judge (Luisa Cruz) coolly dispensing advice as she micromanages her daughter’s sex life via telephone. Subsequently presiding over an audience of costumed witnesses and defendants in an amphitheatre, she breaks down, inundated by Gomes’ collection of “absurd crimes”, which grow ever more crazy, convoluted and corrupt.
The follow-up story is even more disconcerting. It conflates the tale of a marital suicide pact and the squalid details of life in the Lisbon housing project where the couple live, while focusing on their pet terrier, who Gomes points out is “as happy as he would be in a Walt Disney film”.
The third volume, subtitled The Enchanted One, opens with Gomes’ vision of Baghdad (lavishly produced in the environs of Marseilles, France). Here, after deflecting the importuning of a beach boy called Paddleman, Scheherazade is entertained by the break dancing of Elvis the Thief, fends off a genie and rides with her father, the grand vizier, on a Ferris wheel while the turbaned filmmaker smokes a cigarette below. Thereafter, Arabian Nights plunges into a nearly straightforward documentary about Lisbon slum dwellers and their trained birds.
Gomes said he became fascinated by something he discovered on YouTube — a subculture of marginally employed men who catch and train finches to participate in elaborate singing contests. “What they were doing was so unreal,” he explained. “These guys who look like actors from a Scorsese film from the 1980s taking care of these little birds and trying to teach them songs from a computer.”
At once fabulous and quotidian and well over an hour in length, the tale of the finches dominates The Enchanted One. Briefly interrupted by the story of a Chinese tourist in Lisbon, it comes back full force, a film within the film, complete with another pesky genie. Asked if this obsessive story of obsession was not a radical way to conclude his Arabian Nights, Gomes demurred: “It would be very much more radical if I had put it in the beginning!”
According to British scholar Marina Warner, who wrote of the literary Arabian Nights in her book Stranger Magic, “The stories do not obey internal rules about character, motive, verisimilitude or plot structure; they do not easily fit existing theories about fiction, history or psychology.”
The same could be said of those in Gomes’ Arabian Nights — one movie or three — which encompasses all manner of genres while subscribing to none.