Tall Tales
Arabian Nights The multi-movie epic from Portuguese director Miguel Gomes is the year’s maddest proposition.
Y’know, I have to be honest,” admits Miguel Gomes. “I didn’t finish the book. It’s pretty long…” It’s an odd thing to hear from the man who’s spent the last year being lauded at festivals around the world for what might be the most ambitious film ever made – a three part, six-hour epic that reinterprets Scheherazade’s One Thousand And One Nights into a sprawling modern fable about the Portuguese recession.
Clocking in at a bum-numbing 338 minutes, it might sound like the sort of ticket that should come with coffee and flight socks, but Arabian Nights is a long way from being boring.
“It’s punk rock,” says Gomes. “We felt like a garage band when we were making it. We were just reacting to the things around us, trying to respond to whatever was happening in my country. But it came from this feeling, or this urge, that it wouldn’t be enough to base it solely in reality.”
Cue a dizzy half-day collage of short stories – some sad, some funny, most downright absurd. Spanning three thematic chapters (released separately for the faint-hearted – in weekly installments – as The Restless One, The Desolate One and The Enchanted One), the film barrages us with exploding whales, beached mermaids, ghost cows, evil erections, magical dogs, death metal, wizards, genies and Gomes himself – popping up to tell us how difficult the film is to make before introducing a two hour faux-doc about chaffinches. It’s mad, monolithic stuff – and no one had any idea where it would end up when they started filming it.
“There was no structure,” laughs the Portuguese auteur, best known for his lyrical 2012 prize-winner, Tabu. “All I knew was that I was going to try and tell as many stories as I could in a year. Within that time we had a team of journalists investigating different things going on in Portugal, and we transformed that information into our tales. It was like creating the pieces of the puzzle without knowing what the whole picture looked like.”
Describing the process as “a utopia”, the film is as much a comment on filmmaking itself as it is on the state of the nation. “It’s about the problem of telling a story,” considers Gomes. “There is no one exclusive way of looking at anything. There’s no one way of telling a story, no one way of making a film and no one way of talking about Portugal.”
Culled from 12 months of continuous shooting, the final running time seems frankly conservative for a film with so much to say – with reels of extra footage (and extra stories) that didn’t make the edit. Does that mean a director’s cut on the DVD is in the works? Gomes goes quiet. “To be honest, I think the film is big enough already…” PB
ETA | 22 April Arabian Nights begins next month.
‘It’s a punk rock film. We were just reacting to the things around us’