Arabian Nights
Ripping yarns…
Released over three consecutive weeks in separate volumes – The Restless One, The Desolate One, The Enchanted One – totalling nearly six-and-a-half hours, this ambitious trilogy by Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes ( Tabu) is no straight adaptation of the collected stories that comprise One Thousand And One Nights. Instead it borrows the conceit of Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate) telling nightly tales to her kingly husband in an effort to stay alive, but bends those stories so that they might pass comment on a modern-day Portugal crippled by austerity measures.
If that all sounds a little high-minded and dry, it’s saved from being so by an eclectic soundtrack, a palpable love of storytelling, deep humanism, righteous fury, bawdy humour and Gomes’ startling ability to shuffle tones, genres and eras. Surely the first film to leap from the testimony of laid-off dockyard workers to tales bursting with genies, princes and outlaws, Arabian Nights veers from the naturalistic to the fantastical, from documentary to fiction.
Volumes one and two are especially captivating, as Gomes himself appears onscreen to tell of how he charged a team of researchers with scouring Portugal in search of tales. Philosophy and allegory are ripe: foreign wasps kill off the indigenous bee population; politicians drink a magical potion and develop rampant erections; and a cockerel on trial for crowing too early defends himself by saying people didn’t want to be alerted in advance.
Volume 3 contains treasures too, though a faux-doc on singing chaffinches being trained for competition outstays its welcome. The great thing about Arabian Nights is that if one story isn’t to your liking, another pops up, so the decision to give this tale a feature-length running time is perplexing. But quibbles aside, this is daring, magical filmmaking. THE VERDICT One of the princes of arthouse cinema, Miguel Gomes here uses his status to push form and stretch boundaries. Very long but very much worth it. › Certificate TBA Director Miguel Gomes Starring Crista Alfaiate, Carloto Cotta, Maria Rueff, Luisa Cruz Screenplay Telmo Churro, Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo Distributor New Wave Films Running time 125 mins (Vol.1); 131 mins (Vol.2); 125 mins (Vol.3)